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OUR ENGLISH 
 
 BY 
 
 ADAMS SHERMAN HILL 
 
 BOYLSTON PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ORATORY 
 IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
 
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 :, , >' J ! J J 3 ' i ' 
 
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 NEW YORK 
 HAPtPER & BPtOTHEPtS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 
 
 1889 
 
Copyright, 1S88, by Harper & BEornERS. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 
NOTE. 
 
 The five papers which make up this volume 
 have already been published, substantially in 
 tlieir present form : I. and Y. in Harper's 
 Monthly Magazine; 11. and III. in Scrib- 
 ner's Magazine ; and lY. in The Christian 
 Register. 
 
 m4514:9 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 English in Schools 1 
 
 II. 
 English in Colleges 72 
 
 III. 
 
 English in Newspapers and Novels . . 102 
 
 IV. 
 English in the Pulpit 141 
 
 V. 
 Colloquial English 190 
 
In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to 
 preserve our style wholly unalloyed by the vicious 
 phraseology which meets us everywhere, from the 
 sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the 
 legislator to the speech from the convivial chair, 
 announcinf; a toast or sentiment. Our chains rattle 
 even while we are complaining of them. . . . Much, 
 however, may be effected by education. — S. T. Cole- 
 ridge : Biogroplda Literaria {\Q\^). 
 
» O » 1 ■ 
 
 1 iT"*!'* '^ 
 
 I. 
 
 ENGLISH m SCHOOLS. 
 
 EvERr child's English is affected, di- 
 rectly or indirectly, for better or for 
 worse, by causes that begin to operate 
 long before he is required to write com- 
 positions at school. The descendant of 
 men and women who have for genera- 
 tions habitually spoken and written the 
 mother-tongue with correctness and ease, 
 will naturally use better English than 
 the child of illiterate parents ; and if he 
 be so fortunate as to have a nurse whose 
 language is not very faulty, a mother 
 whose own English is pure, and who 
 1 
 
2 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 takes pains to give a wise direction to 
 
 .,, tier children's; reading, play-mates (if 
 
 • 'slich canBe imagined) who are not ad- 
 
 ';. i l-'clictecj to sLitas: ;'or uno^rammatical ex- 
 
 pressions, and teachers who are neither 
 
 prigs nor slovens in their use of words, 
 
 he will, other things being equal, retain 
 
 the superiority he had at birth. 
 
 Not that a well-born and carefully 
 nurtured boy has it all his own way even 
 in the matter of English. His ancestors 
 may have talked or written themselves 
 out, and have left him, like the barren 
 fig-tree, with plenty of leaves, but* no 
 fruit. His facility with words may be 
 a facility fatal not only to thought, but 
 also to strength and directness of expres- 
 sion. A family, on the other hand, — the 
 Carlyles or the Hawthornes, for example, 
 — which has for generations dealt with 
 things rather than with words, may at 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 3 
 
 length produce a great writer, in whom 
 the wisdom long amassed in silence finds 
 literary expression, — a writer who does 
 not, indeed, acquire complete command 
 of language without making exception- 
 ally arduous exertions, but who inherits 
 the energy and the persistency that lead 
 to success in every undertaking. 
 
 In the matter of education too, the 
 race may be to those who possess " stay- 
 ing qualities" rather than to the well- 
 equipped, to the tortoise rather than to 
 the hare. One boy who has all possi- 
 ble advantages at home and in school 
 may fail to profit by them ; another boy 
 will feel his disadvantages so keenly, and 
 will try so resolutely to overcome them, 
 that he cannot but succeed — up to a cer- 
 tain point at least. The speech of the 
 over-cultivated may be languidly correct 
 and nothing more, or it may, in an un- 
 
4: OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 guarded moment, fall into errors tbat 
 have the charm of forbidden fruit; the 
 speech of the under - cultivated may 
 abound in faults, and yet may have life 
 and movement. 
 
 Into the hands of the teacher of Ene- 
 lish come pupils who differ thus widely 
 from one another in everything that can 
 be affected by birth or by early training. 
 Since they began to talk, they have been 
 talking English (good, bad, or indiffer- 
 ent), as Moliere's M. Jourdain talked 
 prose, without knowing it; but they have 
 as yet written nothing except exercises in 
 penmanship and spelling, and brief let- 
 ters to mother or father, which were read 
 with the eyes of affection not disposed 
 to be critical. Now, for the first time, 
 they are asked to write an English com- 
 position. 
 
 The conditions under which they are 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 5 
 
 to write differ in different schools. Some 
 teachers leave their pupils great freedom 
 in the choice of topics, in order that each 
 may be enabled to write about something 
 that he knows and is interested in: oth- 
 ers prescribe a subject, in order that the 
 unpractised hand may be held close to a 
 definite line of work : others vary their 
 method, in order to adjust it to the indi- 
 vidual needs of each pupil ; and this, 
 when practicable, is undoubtedly the best 
 plan. 
 
 Whatever the method, the result is in 
 most cases the same — failure. Even she 
 whose talk is the life of the school at re- 
 cess, writes as if she were on her good 
 behavior at a funeral. Even he who 
 takes the lead among his fellows in ev- 
 erything that requires quickness of wit, 
 becomes insufferably dreary the instant 
 he puts pen to paper. If the lively are 
 
6 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 dull, and the quick-witted sluggish, when 
 they undertake to write compositions, 
 what must be the condition of their less 
 clever companions ? Unhappy pupils of 
 a more unhappy teacher ! 
 
 That the difficulty of which I have 
 spoken is real, and is all but universal, 
 will be admitted by every one who has 
 had much to do with the compositions 
 of beginners. Whence comes this diffi- 
 culty ? Can it be conquered ? 
 
 What reason is there, in the nature of 
 things, why a boy who talks well should 
 not write well, if he can be made to use a 
 pen as naturally as he uses his tongue, — 
 or, in other words, to forget himself in 
 what he is writing, as he foi'gets himself 
 w^hile talking with his playmates ? Why, 
 but because this if is a lion in the way ? 
 A boy must have written much before 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 7 
 
 he can form bis letters without special 
 pains; and much more before he can set 
 down what he has to say without stum- 
 bling over punctuation, spelling, and 
 grammar; and more still before he can 
 write with facility. 
 
 Now, so long as a boy has to struggle 
 at every step with difficulties connected 
 with the mechanics of writing, it will be 
 difficult for him to give his mind to the 
 thing to be written, not only because his 
 mind is otherwise employed, but also be- 
 cause the mental attitude of a person 
 who is absorbed in the substance of 
 what he is writing is entirely different 
 from that of one who is obliged to pay 
 attention to penmanship and other mi- 
 nutiae connected with the process of put- 
 ting words upon paper. 
 
 If, then, the ill success of beginners in 
 English composition be justly attribu- 
 
8 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 table to their inability to retain fresh- 
 ness and life while struofalino- with me- 
 chanical difficulties at every step, it fol- 
 lows that the methods of teaching in 
 our schools are radically defective : for a 
 sound method would prevent both the 
 sacrifice of substance to form, and that 
 of form to substance; a sound method 
 would teach a young writer to beware 
 both of purchasing correctness of expres- 
 sion by dulness, and of trying to secure 
 interest at the cost of accuracy. Dul- 
 ness is death ; ignorance of elementary 
 rules stamps a man as illiterate, and illit- 
 eracy cannot but injure the influence of 
 the most powerful writer with cultivat- 
 ed readers, and, in a less degree, with 
 uncultivated ones also. 
 
 Many teachers, however, act as if they 
 thought it more important that a boy 
 should spell and punctuate correctly than 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 9 
 
 that he should write an essay which it is 
 a pleasure to read. Others, in the fear of 
 taking the life out of a composition, pass 
 lightly over errors in grammar, and leave 
 spelling and punctuation to take care of 
 themselves. Others still — and this I be- 
 lieve to be the most numerous class — try 
 to achieve both objects at once, and fail 
 of achieving either: their puj^ils are 
 characterized by a mediocrity of attain- 
 ment; thev have ceased to be natural 
 and spontaneous, and they are oppressed 
 by the obligation to form their sentences 
 correctly, but do not know how to fulfil 
 that oblifi^ation. 
 
 Boys who have received no instruc- 
 tion in English composition before go- 
 ing to college seem to be better off, on 
 the whole, than those who have had 
 such instruction as is sometimes given. 
 A boy fresh from a single reading of a 
 
10 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 novel, for example, or from a single rep- 
 resentation of a play of Sbakspere, will, 
 if he has been thoroughly interested in 
 the story, tell it in his own words much 
 better than another who has been drilled 
 on every chapter in the novel or every 
 scene in the play. It is possible so to 
 treat the best books as to make them 
 burdensome rather than interesting or 
 stimulating to the youthful mind. I 
 have heard of a boy who came down 
 from his room groaning at his misfort- 
 une in having been kept in-doors by his 
 work. 
 
 " What is the woe this time ?" asked 
 his sympathizing aunt. 
 
 " Oh, I had to read ten chapters of the 
 ' Vicar of Wakefield.' " 
 
 In one school, a boy was expected 
 to get three hundred pages of " Henry 
 Esmond" into his mind within twenty- 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 11 
 
 four hours. lu another school the class 
 went through the same book at a snail's 
 pace, the teacher doing his best to trans- 
 form a lively narrative into a series of 
 tedious exercises. Instead of calling at- 
 tention to the main points of the story, 
 to the characteristics of the principal j)er- 
 sonages, or to beauties of style, he spent 
 his strength on unimportant details, — de- 
 manding, for example, all the particulars 
 of the attack by the mob on the carriage 
 of old Lady Castlewood, including an 
 answer to the important question wheth- 
 er the first vegetable to hit Father Holt 
 was a cabbage, a carrot, or a potato. 
 
 In a school of a very different class, 
 the study of authors is made so inter- 
 esting that pupils who are preparing for 
 colleges which have no examination in 
 English are in the habit of joining the 
 class in this subject for their own pleas- 
 
12 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 ure — an anomaly, I believe, in the an- 
 nals of American institutions of learn- 
 
 ing 
 
 As regards the results of tlie. teaching 
 of English in some of our best schools 
 and academies,! may be pardoned for re- 
 ferring to ray own observation. Between 
 1873, when Harvard College for the 
 first time held an examination in English, 
 and 1884, 1 read several thousand compo- 
 sitions written in the examination-room 
 upon subjects drawn from books which 
 the candidates were required to read be- 
 fore presenting themselves. Of these a 
 hundred, perhaps, — to make a generous 
 estimate, — were creditable to writer or 
 teacher or both. In 1884, Mr. (now 
 Professor) Briggs, who then took charge 
 of the examination, wrote to me as fol- 
 lows: "Few [of the books] were re- 
 markably good, and few extraordinarily 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 13 
 
 bad ; a tedious mediocrity was every- 
 where." '^ 
 
 It is this tedious mediocrity which has 
 amazed me year after year. In spelling, 
 punctuation, and grammar some of the 
 books are a great deal worse than the 
 mass, and some a little better; but in 
 other respects there is a dead level, rarely 
 varied by a fresh thought or an individual 
 expression. Almost all the writers use the 
 same commonplace vocabulary — a very 
 small one — in the same unintelligent 
 way. One year, after reading two or 
 three hundred compositions on "The 
 Story of 'The Tempest,'" I found my 
 recollections of both plot and characters 
 
 * This judgment holds good of the productions 
 of subsequent years. See "The Harvard Admis- 
 sion Examination in English," by L. B. R. Briggs, 
 in The Academy (Syracuse, N. Y.) for September, 
 
 1888. 
 
14 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 SO confused that I bad to read the play 
 to set myself right again. 
 
 The authors of these discouraging man- 
 uscripts may be justly regarded as the 
 picked youth of the country. They were, 
 almost all of them, 
 
 "Just at the age 'twixt boy and youth, 
 When thought is speech, and speech is truth." 
 
 They were all boys with blood in their 
 veins, and brains in their heads, and 
 ton2:ues that could talk fast enoue^h and 
 to the purpose when they felt at ease. 
 Many of them came from the best fam- 
 ilies in point of culture and breeding, 
 and from the best schools we have. 
 Many of them had enjoyed " The Tem- 
 pest" (who that can understand it does 
 not ?), but somehow the touch of pen or 
 pencil paralyzed their powers. 
 
 If the dreary compositions written by 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 15 
 
 the great majority of candidates for ad- 
 mission to college were correct in spell- 
 ing, intelligent in punctuation, and unex- 
 ceptionable in grammar, there would be 
 some compensation ; but this is so far 
 from beins: the case that the instructors 
 of Ensflish in American collei>:es have to 
 spend much of their time and strength 
 in teachinor the A B C of their mother- 
 tongue to young men of twenty — work 
 disao-reeable in itself, and often barren of 
 result. Every year Harvard sends out 
 men — some of them high scholars — 
 whose manuscripts would disgrace a boy 
 of twelve ; and yet the college can hard- 
 ly be blamed, for she cannot be expected 
 to conduct an infant school for adults. 
 
 Is there any remedy for this state of 
 things? 
 
 I venture to say that there is; but it 
 is one which demands persistent and 
 
16 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 long-continued work, and hearty co-oper- 
 ation, on the part of all who have to do 
 with the use of English in our schools 
 in any form and for any purpose. It 
 requires intelligent supervision at one 
 ■ time, intelligent want of supervision at 
 another time, and watchful attention con- 
 stantly. It requires a quick sense of in- 
 dividual needs, and ready wit to provide 
 for them as they arise. 
 
 My plan is briefly as follows : 
 First, I would begin as early as possible 
 to overcome the mechanical difficulties 
 of writing, and would use all practicable 
 means and all possible opportunities to 
 do so; secondly, I would not frighten a 
 boy with "compositions" or "essays" or 
 " themes," till he could form his sentences ' 
 with tolerable correctness, and use his 
 pen with freedom ; but, thirdly, when I 
 had once set him to writing compositions, 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 17 
 
 I would keep him steadily at the work, 
 and at tlie same time would make him 
 take an interest in what he is doiuo:, 
 and impress him with the importance 
 of having something to say, and of say- 
 inof that somethino; well. 
 
 First. As soon as a child has learned 
 to form his letters without trouble, his 
 attention should be called, not only to 
 spelling, punctuation, and grammar, but 
 also to the choice of words and to the 
 construction of simple sentences ; and he 
 should be obliged to master every point 
 that comes under the head of correctness. 
 In this matter the instructor should not 
 spare himself, should resist the tempta- 
 tion to spend time on the curiosities of 
 language, or in the pleasant places of lit- 
 erature, rather than in the correction of 
 
 petty erroi's, and should constantly bear 
 
 2 
 
18 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 in mind that, unless petty errors are cor- 
 rected at the beginning, there is danger 
 that they never will be. 
 
 Knowledge of conventional rules is, I 
 am told, of incomparably less importance 
 than the possession of those qualities in 
 style which give a man the power to 
 influence other men's thourfits and ac- 
 tions; but this remark, true enough in 
 itself, has no application to children. In 
 English, as in everything else, children 
 must be tauo^ht the rudiments first. To 
 omit them altogether, or to postpone 
 them too long, is to act like a student 
 in architecture who should pay no at- 
 tention to questions of construction, or 
 should take them up for the first time 
 after he had acquainted himself with the 
 mysteries of the so-called Queen Anne 
 style. Such an architect might forget to 
 leave room in his plan for a necessary 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 19 
 
 staircase, and Lis chimneys would surely 
 smoke. Such a writer would be lame in 
 his grammar, and would probably not 
 know how to spell or to punctuate. 
 
 Not that I would, in pursuance of Mr. 
 Benjamin F. Butler's advice, replace the 
 spelling-book in its former commanding 
 position in the schools, and compel boys 
 and girls to learn long lists of words 
 which they would have no occasion to 
 use: but every one should be able to 
 spell the words that are often on his 
 lips, or often under his eye in the books 
 he studies or reads. Not that I would 
 perplex a young mind with punctuation 
 as a system, or with nice questions be- 
 tween semicolons and colons : but every 
 one should at an early age be taught 
 the difference between the period and 
 the comma, and the j^rincipal functions 
 of each ; every one should be taught, 
 
20 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 too, the general principle that a point 
 serves as a guide to tlie construction, and 
 tbrousrb the construction to the meaning; 
 of a sentence. 
 
 Above all, the time and the energies 
 of the young should not be wasted upon 
 formal grammar. "As he" [man], says 
 Bacon, "hath striven against the first gen- 
 eral Curse by the Invention of all other 
 Arts, so hath he sought to come forth of 
 the second general Curse, which was the 
 confusion of Tongues, by the Art oiGraw- 
 7)iai\ whereof the use in a mother-tongue 
 is small; in a foreign tongue more; but 
 most in such Foreign Tongues as have 
 ceased to be Vulgar Tongues^ and are 
 turned only to learned tongues^ 
 
 The misfortune of our schools has been 
 that they have transferred the nomen- 
 clature and the system of the learned 
 tongues to the mother-tongue, in which. 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 21 
 
 as Bacon truly says, the use of grammar 
 is small. The consequence has too often 
 been that the art which, according to 
 Bacon, was invented to relieve man from 
 the second general curse, has become a 
 third curse. 
 
 Within the last few years, as we all 
 like to believe, this curse has in a meas- 
 ure been lightened. Even teachers of 
 Latin and Greek are less disposed to load 
 the memories of boys and girls with rules 
 and exceptions, and are giving the neces- 
 sary information by the way, as it w^ere, 
 and in a manner that enables their pu- 
 pils to perceive some relation between 
 the facts of grammar and the language 
 and literature studied. The best instruct- 
 ors in Eno^lish are movins; in the same 
 direction ; but few of them are moving 
 far enough or fast enough. 
 
 Would not our schools be better off, 
 
22 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 on the whole, if every vestige of the 
 Lindley Murray system were swept out 
 of them ? There are teachers of English, 
 I know, who make the study of gram- 
 mar and the analysis of sentences profit- 
 able to their pupils ; but how many 
 precious hours are wasted on mere pars- 
 ing, as if it were not more important for 
 a child to understand a eriven sentence 
 as a wdiole than to know that this word 
 in the sentence is a noun, that word a 
 preposition, that one an adverb of man- 
 ner, — or whatever it mav be called in 
 the treatise in voo;ue at the moment. 
 
 Several hours judiciously used should 
 suffice to teach an intelligent boy the few 
 points of grammar which it is most nec- 
 essary to know; for the assertion that 
 Enf'lish is ''a o^rammarless tono;ue,"thoucrh 
 an exaggeration, — and a harmful one if 
 understood literally, — has a basis in the 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 23 
 
 fact that the changes of form in English 
 words are very few, and that the rules 
 of syntax are far simpler in our language 
 than in most others. A few nouns form 
 peculiar plurals, a few verbs peculiar par- 
 ticiples, and a very few verbs are pecul- 
 iar throughout; but most of these excep- 
 tions occur in words which everybody 
 uses so often that it is easy to learn the 
 correct forms. A similar remark may be 
 made concerning who and lohom^ I and 
 mie^ and the other pronouns. Let a boy 
 be taught to use his pronouns correctly, 
 and to place them where there can be 
 no doubt as to their antecedents; to 
 couple singulars with singulars and plu- 
 rals with plurals ; to observe the distinc- 
 tion between shall and loill; to put verbs 
 referring; to the same time in the same 
 tense; not to destroy a negative by doub- 
 ling it ; not to interpolate adverbs be- 
 
24 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 tweeii the two parts of the infinitive, as 
 in to blindly foUoiv J to so say (a common 
 error); to insert every word that is es- 
 sential to the grammar, and to strike 
 out every word that is superfluous; — 
 let a boy be taught these things, and 
 he will be far on the road to correct ex- 
 pression. 
 
 Grammatical accuracy should, in my 
 judgment, be taught by example rather 
 thau by precept, indirectly rather than 
 directly. What progress there would be 
 if all the teachers in the schools of every 
 grade were all the time on the watch for 
 errors! — if they never allowed one to 
 pass, in an oral or a written exercise, in 
 notes of lectures, in examination-books, in 
 note-books, or even in conversation in the 
 school-room ! 
 
 In the classical schools, teachers of 
 Greek and Latin may do much to help 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 25 
 
 the cause of good English without going 
 out of their way, or of what should be 
 their way. They may insist, for exam- 
 ple, that every translated sentence, wheth- 
 er spoken or written, shall be a good 
 English sentence at all points. This is 
 done in England ; and hence it is that 
 Eton and Harrow boys, though they 
 receive little training; in their own Ian- 
 guage by itself, write better English than 
 American boys of the same age. This 
 is done in France; and hence it is that 
 every educated Frenchman writes idio- 
 matic French. 
 
 In this country too, I am happy to say, 
 attention is beginning to be paid to Eng- 
 lish by teachers of other subjects. In sev- 
 eral quarters, students in Latin or Greek, 
 French or German, are encourasred to 
 make translation a means of enriching 
 their English vocabulary, and enlarg- 
 
26 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 ino^ tbeir knowleclo::e of Enc-lisli idioms. 
 Tbe master of one academy within my 
 knowledge does not allow bis pupils to 
 make tbe ordinary word-for-word trans- 
 lation of tbe Latin ablative absolute. He 
 insists tbat tbe sentence, " Tarquin hav- 
 ing been ex23elled, two consuls began to 
 be created instead of one king," or the 
 sentence, " No one w^ill be about to be a 
 thief, we being tbe aid," is not an Eng- 
 lish sentence, is not the English equiv- 
 alent of tbe Latin. At least one college 
 has, at tbe instance of the Ene^lisb in- 
 structors, inserted tbe following words 
 in its statement of the requirements for 
 admission to the Freshman Class: "The 
 passages set for translation must be ren- 
 dered into simple and idiomatic English. 
 Teachers are requested to insist on tbe 
 use of good English as an essential part 
 of the candidate's training in trausla- 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 27 
 
 tion" — a reqiiii'ement ^Yhich, if strictly 
 enforced, cannot fail to tell for good upon 
 the candidate's command of his mother- 
 tongue. 
 
 The truth is that the study of other 
 Ian2:ua2:es than our own, whether ancient 
 or modern, may be so pursued as to harm 
 the cause of good English, or so pursued 
 as to be of c^reat service to it. Not a few 
 graduates of preparatory schools resem- 
 ble the young man in one of Mr. James 
 Payn's novels, " whose education had 
 been classical, and did not, therefore, in- 
 clude spelling." A teacher wrote to me 
 in grieved surprise at the failure of two 
 of his best pupils to pass "with credit" in 
 English composition. Ke-examining the 
 books, I discovered that each of the two 
 boys had been guilty of a sentence like 
 one of those quoted above — a sentence 
 such as no English-speaking person who 
 
28 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 had not had frequent- dialogues with the 
 dead lano:uao;es would have written. On 
 the other hand, translation may be one 
 of the best means of improving the style 
 and stimulating the powers of expres- 
 sion. It has been so used by many fti- 
 mous men. Rufus Choate, for example, 
 whose command of language was unsur- 
 passed, made a point of spending an hour 
 or more every day in rendering into 
 English passages from another tongue, 
 returning sometimes day after day to the 
 same passage, until he had succeeded in 
 giving to his English all the merits of 
 the original. "Translation," he is re- 
 ported to have said, " should be pursued 
 to bring to mind and to employ all the 
 words you already own, and to tax and 
 torment invention and discovery and tlie 
 very deepest memory for additional, rich, 
 and admirably expressive words." 
 
ENGLISH m SCHOOLS. 29 
 
 Examination ■ books may be treated, 
 •as they are in some of our schools, not 
 merely as tests of knowledge, but also 
 as exercises in expression. Instead of 
 resembling, as they too often do, the pro- 
 ductions of an illiterate mind and an 
 unpractised, hand, instead of undoing in 
 three hours all the good that has been 
 gained in three weeks of instruction in 
 English, they may be made of real serv^- 
 ice to the student by giving him practice 
 in stating what he knows in exact and 
 intelligible words. If he expects all his 
 written Avork to be judged, in part, by 
 the quality of his English, he will take 
 pains to express himself correctly. To 
 secure this result, every teacher might at 
 least do what is done in some schools in 
 Ohio: he might give a certain percent- 
 age of the examination marks for pen- 
 manship, neatness, and accuracy, and 
 
30 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 might oblige every scholar to write in 
 ink — a safeguard against slovenliness. 
 
 Correctness and clearness of expres- 
 sion are all that the teachers of other 
 subjects than English can be expected to 
 find time for: but these they should de- 
 mand, in their own interest and in that 
 of their specialty, as w^ell as in the in- 
 terest of their pupils and of the mother- 
 tongue ; for a man cannot properly be 
 said to know a thing until he knows it 
 well enouo;h to be able to make a state- 
 ment about it that shall be intelli^rible 
 to an intelligent reader. 
 
 Somewhat more may be done by the 
 teacher who makes it his business to ex- 
 amine a piece of written work as an 
 exercise in English. He may welcome 
 every spark of intellectual life, every 
 picturesque phrase, every happy turn 
 of sentence, every strong word he comes 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 31 
 
 upoD, and even some expressions that, 
 thongli open to criticism, are often on 
 the boy's lips and naturally flow from 
 his pen. He should leave free play to 
 individuality, remembering that an opin- 
 ion which is a boy's own is worth more 
 to him than the most orthodox doo:mas 
 taken at second hand. " To sit as a 
 passive bucket," says Carlyle, "and be 
 pumped into, whether you consent or 
 not, can, in the long-run, be exhilarating 
 to no creature." Not even if the pump 
 draws from the well of truth ; and which 
 of us can be sure that his private pump 
 does that ? 
 
 Among the things which teachers of 
 every class should struggle against is 
 what I must be pardoned for calling 
 " school-masters' En owlish" — the dialect of 
 men and women 'whose business keeps 
 them in close relations with young 
 
32 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 minds, and who, being to a great ex- 
 tent cut off from intercourse with the 
 world outside of the school - room, are 
 apt to attribute undue importance to 
 petty matters, to insist upon rules in 
 cases where the best usas^e leaves free- 
 dom of choice, to prefer bookish and 
 pompous ways of putting things to easy 
 and natural ones. 
 
 In many schools, boys and girls are 
 taught to put commas between the sev- 
 eral parts of the address on the envelope 
 of a letter. The rule would be correct 
 if the words formins^ the address were 
 written continuously, as in the body of a 
 book; but the separation of each part of 
 the address from every other part alters 
 the question. Consequently, some of the 
 most careful writers — folio win 2^ the fash- 
 ion of modern title-pages and of inscrip- 
 n/ tions on monuments in public squares 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 33 
 
 and cemeteries — either put a period at 
 the end of each line, or leave out all 
 stops except those which mark abbrevia- 
 tions. Some teachers insist that the rel- 
 ative that should be used, instead of 
 ivlio or ivliichy when the relative clause 
 serves to restrict the meanins: of the an- 
 tecedent, and that who or lohich should 
 be used, instead of that, when the rela- 
 tive clause adds something to the mean- 
 ing of the antecedent, or explains it ; and 
 yet the best authorities, from Addison to 
 Anthony Trollope, obey no such rule, but 
 are guided by the ear in their choice be- 
 tween who or ivhich and that. A distinc- 
 tion is set up in the schools between each 
 other and one another, according as the 
 reference is to two or to more than two 
 persons ; and yet scarcely a good author 
 can be found who does not use the two 
 forms interchangeably. Another article 
 3 
 
34 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 of the school-master creed holds that a 
 sentence should never end with a prep- 
 osition, as if the most idiomatic writ- 
 ers, the writers easiest and most agreea- 
 ble to read, did not abound in such sen- 
 tences. 
 
 In the cases that have been mentioned, 
 the best usaere is ao;ainst the school-mas- 
 ters ; but even when there is a question 
 between two forms of expression, usage 
 being almost equally divided, a teacher 
 will do well to postpone discussion of 
 the disputed point till his pupils have 
 mastered those parts of the language on 
 wdiich good writers are agreed. 
 
 Still another danger of teachers springs 
 from their disposition to set an undue 
 value on the slavish reproduction by 
 pupils of what they have heard from 
 the desk. The writing-master calls that 
 the best chirograT)hy which most nearly 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 35 
 
 resembles his own "copper-plate," flour- 
 ishes and all ; the elocutionist rates most 
 highly the pupil who succeeds best in 
 imitating his master's tones and gest- 
 ures; and the teacher of English too 
 often has most praise for sentences that 
 resemble his own — particularly if they 
 are free from all faults excejDt that of 
 having no merits. No system is more 
 likely than this to arrest the growth of 
 a young mind and to stunt its powers 
 of expression ; for " frigid correctness," in 
 the words of Cherbuliez, " is the bane of 
 all art." 
 
 Worst of all forms of school -master 
 Eno'lish are those that come from unwill- 
 ingness to call a spade a spade. 
 
 " I have been trying for years," said a 
 school-girl, the other day, " to say ' I rose 
 at seven,' instead of got vp — got is such 
 a horrid word !" 
 
36 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 ^' Do you ^^y retire instead of go to 
 hedr 
 
 " Oh yes : I have been taught to avoid 
 common expressions." 
 
 That is to say, this innocent young 
 girl had been taught to despise the 
 words of daily life, and to affect the 
 vulgar finery and sham delicacy charac- 
 teristic of those who talk about culinary 
 department^ hymeneal altar ^ caskets for 
 the remains of the departed, author of 7ny 
 being, maternal relative, patrons of hus- 
 handry, potahles, nether extremities, or 
 lower limbs — that part of the person 
 which is referred to in the rule of a sem- 
 inary quoted in Longfellow's "Kava- 
 nagh," the rule which forbade the young 
 ladies to " cross their benders^ ^ 
 
 * After reading this paper, on its first ap- 
 pearance, the author of "The Frivolous Girl" 
 " dropped into " verse, as follows : 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 37 
 
 It is not well-bred j)ersons who are 
 ashamed to use the brief, simple, definite, 
 
 {After reading Prof. A. S. H'dVs article on '''■English in the 
 Schools,^'' in Harper's Monthly for June.) 
 
 IMMODESTY. 
 
 I am a modest little maid, 
 
 AVho thinkf it more polite 
 To bid a man "good-evening," 
 
 Than bid a man "good-night." 
 And Tvhen the human members 
 
 Are spoken of by him, 
 I always call what doctors call 
 
 "A leg" "a lower limb." 
 
 I am a modest little maid, 
 
 Who never goes to bed ; 
 But to my chamber I "retire" 
 
 Most properly instead. 
 And when the chaste Aurora 
 
 Unseals my sleepy eyes, 
 The act which some call "getting up" 
 
 I designate "to rise." 
 
 I never speak of feeling "sick," 
 
 But always say I'm "ill." 
 And being in my dressing-gown, 
 
 I style ''en dishabille." 
 In fact I always hesitate 
 
 To call a spade a spade, 
 
 Because, you see, I try to be 
 
 A modest little maid. 
 
 Robert Grant. 
 
38 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 ordinary words which naturally come to 
 the lips. It is not the writers of leaders 
 in our best newspapers, but the penny-a- 
 liners, the reporters of fires and police 
 items, who have the fondness for vague 
 words and tawdry circumlocutions which 
 gives rise to the " elegant " diction of 
 teachers like Mrs. General in " Little 
 Dorrit," as displayed in her conversa- 
 tions with Miss Fanny, her pu23il. 
 
 " ^ They wouldn't have been recalled 
 to our remembrance, I suspect, if uncle 
 hadn't tumbled over the subject.' 
 
 " '• My dear, what a curious phrase !' 
 said Mrs. General. ' Would not " inad- 
 vertently lighted upon," or " accidentally 
 referred to," be better V 
 
 "'Thank you very much, Mrs. Gen- 
 eral,' returned the young lady. 'No; I 
 think not. On the whole, I prefer my 
 own expression.' 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 39 
 
 " This,'* continues Dickens, " was al- 
 ways Miss Fanny's way of receiving a 
 siio-o-estion from Mrs. General. But she 
 always stored it np in her mind, and 
 adopted it at another time." 
 
 A teacher very different from Mrs. 
 General was the master of the school 
 (Christ's Hospital) where Lamb and 
 Coleridsfe were tauo^ht. Of him Cole- 
 ridge says, "In our own English com- 
 positions (at least for the last three 
 years of our school education), he showed 
 no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image 
 unsupported by a sound sense, or where 
 the same sense might have been con- 
 veyed with equal force and dignity in 
 plainer words. Lute, liarp^ and lyre, 
 Muse^ Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, 
 Parnassus, and Hippocrene, were all an 
 abomination to him. In fancy I can 
 hear him now exclaiming, ^Har^^? harp? 
 
40 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 lyre ? Pen and ink, boy, you mean ! 
 Muse, boy. Muse? Your nurse's daugh- 
 ter, you mean ! Pierian spring ? Oh 
 ay ! the cloister pump, I suppose.' " 
 
 It was this same master, hostile to the 
 sham - classical as he was, who moulded 
 Coleridge's taste in both ancient and 
 modern literature, and taught him sound 
 principles of criticism in poetry. 
 
 Secondly, I would not require a boy 
 or a girl to write a formal composition 
 until the elementary difficulties of work 
 with the pen shall have been in a great 
 measure overcome. If good English has 
 been treated from the very beginning 
 of school life, not as a thing by itself, 
 but as part and parcel of every study 
 in which the mother -tongue is used, 
 whether orally or in writing ; if the 
 pupil has been taught to regard skill 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 41 
 
 in the use of his own lan<2:uao^e as an 
 essential of scholarshij^, without which 
 a so - called educated man, however ex- 
 tensive his knowledge of books, must be 
 deemed a learned dunce ; if he has been 
 accustomed to write, not for the sake of 
 writing, but in order to put what he 
 knows on a given subject into a porta- 
 ble form ; if he has written so often and 
 so much as to have overcome the dif- 
 ficulties connected with the manual la- 
 bor of penmanship ; if his errors in 
 spelling have never been allowed to 
 pass uncorrected, and his memory has 
 been forced by constant exercise to mas- 
 ter the arbitrary forms of words that are 
 in ordinary use ; if he has been made to 
 see that the rules of punctuation and 
 grammar, though to a certain extent ar- 
 bitrary, are for the most part helps to 
 the accurate and prompt communication 
 
42 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 of thought from one mind to another, 
 and that this principle, as carried out in 
 practice by the best authors, underlies 
 all the rules which determine the choice, 
 the num?jer, and the order of words in 
 any piece of writing, — if, in short, a pu- 
 pil has been led gradually and incident- 
 ally to acquaint himself with the rudi- 
 ments of good English, more will have 
 been done towards teaching him the art 
 of composition than could have been ac- 
 complished by the writing of essays on 
 topics outside of his regular studies — es- 
 says which would have been burdens to 
 him, because clear additions to his usual 
 tasks, and bugbears, because so infre- 
 quent that he did not get used to them. 
 This, which may be called the indirect 
 method of teachins: the rudiments of Eng*- 
 lish, has one decided advantage over the 
 direct method, in addition to those al- 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 43 
 
 ready mentioned. The English of an 
 examination-book or of a translation ap- 
 pears to the pupil to be, as it really is, a 
 means to an end, like the Englisli he 
 talks on the playground or at an even- 
 ing party. The English of a boy's for- 
 mal essay, on the contrary, may be, and 
 often is, merely words that serve no pur- 
 pose, and seem to him to serve none, 
 except that of filling the prescribed 
 number of pages. At an examination, 
 his knowledge of the facts on which 
 each question is based supplies material 
 for his sentences; and the c^uestions on 
 the paper direct him in the use of that 
 material : in the formal essay he has, or 
 thinks he has, nothing to say on the 
 subject given out, and he is usually sup- 
 plied with nothing definite to guide his 
 mind and steady his steps. " Scholars 
 in universities," says Bacon, "come .too 
 
44: OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 soon and too unripe to Logic and Rhet- 
 oric, arts fitter for Graduates than Chil- 
 dren and ^Novices ; for these two, right- 
 ly taken, are the greatest of sciences, 
 being the Arts of Arts, the one for Judg- 
 ment, the other for ornament, and they 
 be the Rules and Directions how to set 
 forth and dispose matters ; and therefore, 
 for minds empty and unfraught with 
 matter, and which have not gathered that 
 which Cicero calleth Sylva and Supellex 
 (stuff and variety), to begin with, those 
 Arts (as if one should learn to weigh, or 
 to measure, or to paint the Wind) doth 
 work but this effect, that the wisdom of 
 those Arts, which is great and universal, 
 is almost made contemptible, and is de- 
 generate into childish sophistry and ridic- 
 ulous affectation. And further, the un- 
 timely learning of them hath drawn on, 
 by consequence, the superficial and un- 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 45 
 
 profitable teaching and writing of them, 
 as fittest, indeed, to the capacity of chil- 
 di'en." 
 
 Thirdly. Compositions, when they are 
 required, should be written so often as 
 to form an important part of school work. 
 So far as is possible under the conditions 
 of the school, they should be made to 
 flower naturally out of that part of each 
 pupil's life in which he is most at home, 
 be it work or play. He should be made 
 to understand that the essential part of 
 an essay is thought, well-organized and 
 'well-expressed ; that to comprehend clear- 
 ly and to feel strongly what one has to 
 say are the indispensable conditions of 
 making others comprehend and feel it. 
 A boy should never sit down to write 
 until he has substantially settled his 
 course of thought ; but when he does 
 
46 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 begin, he should give his whole mind to 
 the work of expressing his ideas in lan- 
 guage that can be easily understood. 
 
 A wise teacher of English will try to 
 make his 2iu2:)ils put their real selves 
 behind the pen, and keep them there. 
 Anxious not to do anything that shall 
 cramp the free play of individual talent, 
 he w^ill at first be careful to let some 
 elementary faults pass unnoticed ; for 
 " many a clever boy," as Scott says in 
 his diary, "has been flogged into a dunce, 
 and many an original composition correct- 
 ed into mediocrity." A wise teacher will 
 give special attention to the acquirement 
 of unity and flow, the qualities which 
 belong to a composition, as distinguished 
 from a disorderly and inharmonious col- 
 lection of words. 
 
 To the end of unity, the pupil should 
 be tausrht that each of his sentences must 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 47 
 
 contain one, and but one, proposition, — 
 tliat is, must say but one thing, — stated 
 as briefly and plainly as is consistent 
 with clearness and fulness of statement, 
 and that each must be so framed as to 
 carry on the thought from what precedes 
 to what follows ; that each of his para- 
 graphs must deal with a single part of 
 the subject in hand, and be made up of 
 sentences which belong together by 
 virtue of their common relation to that 
 part; that a new paragraph must begin 
 when a new division of the subject is 
 entered upon, and that this new para- 
 graph must contain that which comes 
 next in order of thought to the para- 
 graph it follows. If there is method in 
 the arrangement of the words in a sen- 
 tence, of the sentences in a paragraph, 
 and of the paragraphs in an essay, the 
 essay as a whole will mean something, 
 
48 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 if tlie writer Las a meaning, and sonie- 
 thuvj- definite. 
 
 One good way of teaching a boy how 
 to find out wliat is, and what is not, in 
 his own essay is to have him make an 
 al)stract of it in ten lines. He will ei- 
 ther fail to do so because there is noth- 
 ing to make an abstract of, or he will 
 succeed, and in succeeding will discover 
 how to rearrange his materials, if they 
 need rearrangement, so as to call order 
 out of chaos. If a would-be fine writer 
 can open his eyes to the fact that his 
 essay has no body, he is likely to find 
 something to say next time. If a con- 
 fused writer can be made to brinix the 
 meaninjj!: of one of his obscure sentences 
 into light, he will express himself more 
 clearly in future; for he ^vill perceive 
 that he has gained by the change, in 
 space as well as in perspicuity. In writ- 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 49 
 
 ing, as in lioiise-keeping, to have a place 
 for everything is to save time, temper, 
 and work for all concerned. 
 
 Unity of composition may be furtliered 
 by the practice of prescribing definite sub- 
 jects for essays, and of insisting that pu- 
 pils shall confine themselves to the exact 
 subject prescribed. The inevitable result 
 of giving out a vague subject is a vague 
 and confused piece of writing, or a com- 
 position like those of two school-girls of 
 whom I heard the other day. Being re- 
 quired to write upon Friendship, they 
 put their heads together with a view to 
 the production of essays that should rep- 
 resent their united eftbrts, and should at 
 the same time differ from each other. 
 One began thus: "There are two kinds 
 of friendship." The other opened in a 
 more stately style: "Friendship may be 
 regarded as consisting of two kinds or 
 
50 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 varieties." What can a girl or a boy 
 find to say on Friendship, or on a sub- 
 ject like those given in an English book 
 on composition recently published, — 
 "Home Kule;" "The Channel Tunnel;" 
 " What is Poetry ? Expound this sub- 
 ject by obverse illustration" — ? 
 
 Ask a girl or a boy to write about 
 poetry, or punctuality, or perseverance, 
 or consistency, and she or he will write 
 about and about it — about the word, 
 that is to say, not stopping to define it, 
 but repeating it over and over again, 
 and saying things more or less distantly 
 connected with it, in the order in which 
 they occur to the memory ; for the mind 
 can hardly be said to take part in the 
 exercise. 
 
 He or she will do somewhat better if 
 asked to write on subjects like the fol- 
 lowing: "One should learn to like poetry 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 51 
 
 early;" "The punctual man wastes more 
 time than the un2:>uuctual;" "Genius is 
 an infinite capacity for taking pains;" 
 " Consistency is the hobgoblin of little 
 minds ;" — will do better because each of 
 these texts contains an assertion which 
 may be sustained or refuted by argu- 
 ment, that is, by well-ordered thought. 
 The difficulty, however, with topics of 
 this class is that they cannot be satisfac- 
 torily discussed without more information 
 than children possess. Even if the teach- 
 er supplies the requisite knowledge, boys 
 and aii'ls will not take so much interest 
 in such subjects as they take in facts ob- 
 tained at first hand, or in arguments 
 which they have themselves thought 
 out. They may attain unity ; but it 
 w^ill be a unity in form rather than in 
 substance, the unity of a manufactured 
 article, not that of a natural product. 
 
62 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 Subjects sliould be concrete as well as 
 definite, and should be adapted to the age 
 and experience of those who are to write 
 upon them. A teacher should be so well 
 acquainted with the minds of his pupils 
 that he knows what interests or can be 
 made to interest them, and should choose 
 his subjects in the light of that knowl- 
 edge, being careful, at the same time, to 
 confine each topic within narrow limits. 
 If a boy has been greatly interested in 
 an industrial exhibition, he may be asked 
 to give, not a general account of the 
 show, — a demand which would result 
 either in a flight of superlatives or in a 
 reproduction of the catalogue, — but a 
 full and precise account of one thing he 
 has seen, of the latest form of type- 
 writer or of sewing-machine, for exam- 
 ple. If he has been reading Irving's 
 " Sketch Book " with pleasure, he may 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 63 
 
 be asked to compare Christmas as he 
 knows it in his own home with Christ- 
 mas as it used to be in England, or to 
 tell the story of Kip Van Winkle as he 
 would tell it if he were trying to amuse 
 a younger brother. What Carlyle wrote 
 to a young man who talked of writing 
 a criticism on Shakspere will hold good 
 in the case of every boy or girl. " The 
 thing," said Carlyle, "he will have the 
 chance to write entertainingly upon will 
 be something he specially himself has 
 seen, not probably Shakspere, I should 
 say, which all the ^^'Orld these two cen- 
 turies has been doing; its best to see." 
 
 The essential thing in the subject for a 
 boy's composition is that it should be one 
 which his mind will take hold of, as it 
 takes hold of a game of ball or a story- 
 book. To put him at his ease, he may 
 at first be required to write in his own 
 
54 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 words tlie substance of something read 
 or told to him, or he may be allowed to 
 dictate his comj)ositious ; for as a rule 
 he is more natural when speaking than 
 when writing, keeps to the point more 
 closely, and gets along more rapidly. 
 
 Next in importance among the quali- 
 ties which a teacher should strive to in- 
 fuse into the writings of his pupils is that 
 known in the text-books under different 
 names (as flow, ease, elegance, beauty, 
 music, harmony, euphony, smoothness), 
 the quality which renders written words 
 a2:reeable to the ear and the taste, the 
 quality which is possessed in a pre-emi- 
 nent degree by Addison and Goldsmith 
 among the dead, and by Cardinal New- 
 man and Mr. Ruskin amonfy the livino:. 
 This excellence may be purchased — as 
 it is in some of the histories of Irving or 
 of Prescott — at the cost of brevity and 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 65 
 
 vigor. Its absence may be made up for 
 (with some readers at least) by pict- 
 uresqiieness and strength, as in Carlyle's 
 "Latter day Pamphlets;" but even those 
 papers are hard reading for many on ac- 
 count of their deficiencies in this respect. 
 Similar deficiencies, unrelieved by equal 
 merits, greatly diminish one's pleasure 
 in readino^ some of the works of Sir Ar- 
 thur Helps; and they are fatal to the 
 perusal of many books of science by any 
 one but a specialist. 
 
 I will not say that the text-books on 
 rhetoric ought to give more sjDace than 
 they do to this element of a good style : 
 for, even if it were possible, it w^ould in 
 many cases be inexpedient to train the 
 ear by precepts; were euphony insisted 
 on, young writers might be tempted to 
 sacrifice force to elegance, sense to sound. 
 The teacher of English should, however. 
 
56 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 recommend novices in composition to 
 read authors distinguished for a flowing 
 style, and should call their attention to 
 chosen examples of the best work of 
 such authors. He should point out to 
 his pupils passages in their own com- 
 positions that are obscure or ineffective, 
 because of clumsiness in a form of ex- 
 pression, or want of ease in a transition, 
 or inharmoniousness in the collocation 
 of words. A young writer should be 
 made to understand that, to have unity 
 in the fullest sense, an essay must have 
 movement as well as method, and that 
 any interruption in the flow of language 
 is a source of difficulty and of irritation 
 to the reader, since it calls his attention 
 from the meaning of a sentence to the 
 words which compose it, or from the line 
 of thought in a paragraph to the parti- 
 cles which fasten the sentences together. 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 57 
 
 Pupils should be taught that, to be 
 sure of havino; movement in their com- 
 positions, they must have it in them- 
 selves. A writer who stops at the end 
 of every sentence to bite his pen, or to 
 stare at the ceiling, or to talk with a vis- 
 itor, will never acquire a flowing style. 
 He who is not interested in his own 
 work has small chance of interestino; 
 others; he who keeps interrupting him- 
 self can hardly expect that his readers 
 will find continuity in what he has writ- 
 ten. 
 
 Before sitting down to write, a boy 
 should have thousfht out what he has to 
 say, and should have arranged it in an 
 orderly manner, so that there shall be a 
 beginning, a middle, and an end ; when 
 he does sit down at his desk, he can and 
 he should write at a heat. Then, if 
 ever, words will follow w^ords, and sen- 
 
58 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 tences sentences, and paragraphs para- 
 graphs, naturally and with ease. If be- 
 tween a first draught thus produced — 
 after thought and with speed — and the 
 finished composition, sufficient time shall 
 elapse to enable him to forget a large 
 23art of what he has written, so much 
 the better; for he will then approach 
 hh work like a stranger, and will see, as 
 a stranger would see, where he has failed 
 to express clearly or vigorously what 
 he has tried to say. Lapse of time and 
 chano:e of mood are excellent critics. 
 
 Finally, the teacher of English compo- 
 sition should give to each of his pupils 
 enough but not too much help, should 
 be to each a staff, not a crutch. To cor- 
 rect every error is almost as bad as to 
 make no corrections at all. The teacher 
 should point out faults, but the scholar 
 should be encouraged to find remedies 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 59 
 
 himself. Prevailino: demerits should be 
 noted, and prevailing merits also, if there 
 be any. In many cases it will be found 
 that a thorouo^h chano^e for the better 
 cannot be roade without the recastiu^: 
 of the whole composition . and this will 
 be a useful exercise for all, and most 
 useful to the best writers in the class ; 
 for to them no part of the work will be 
 a mere copyist's drudgery, but all will 
 heljD to train them in the effective use of 
 language, as such work has always helped 
 men who have taught themselves to write 
 or have been taught by good teachers. 
 
 Another plan is that of Coleridge's 
 master — a plan which that great writer 
 regards as "imitable and worthy of imita- 
 tion." " He would," says Coleridge, "often 
 permit our exercises, under some pretext 
 of want of time, to accumulate till each 
 lad had four or ^ve to be looked over. 
 
60 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 Then placing the whole number abreast 
 on his desk, he would ask the writer 
 why this or that sentence might not 
 have found as approj^riate a place under 
 this or that other thesis ; and if no satis- 
 fiictory answer could be returned, and 
 two faults of the same kind were found 
 in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict 
 followed, the exercise was torn up, and 
 another on the same subject [had] to be 
 produced, in addition to the task of the 
 day." 
 
 It is evident from what I have said all 
 alono: that I am no believer in the doc- 
 trine that a good book or a good essay 
 can be written by one who has nothing 
 to say, or that, in English composition, 
 form is one thins; and substance another. 
 Even if it were true that words are the 
 clothiuo; of thou2:ht, it would follov/ that 
 words without thought, however skil- 
 
ENGLISH m SCHOOLS. 61 
 
 fully knit together, however richly em- 
 broidered with figures of speech, must 
 still bear the same relation to words 
 with thought that an ingeniously con- 
 structed scarecrow bears to the farmer 
 who made it. In the best writers, how- 
 ever, words are not the clothing of 
 thought : they are thought incarnate ; 
 the language and the idea are united, 
 like soul and body, in a mysterious way 
 which nobody fully understands. More 
 than this. In a great writer the style 
 is the man — the man as made by his an- 
 cestors, his education, his career, his cir- 
 cumstances, and his genius. 
 
 It is idle, then, to attempt to secure a 
 good style by imitating this or that 
 writer ; for the best part of a good 
 style is incommunicable. An imitator 
 may, if he applies himself closely to 
 the task, catch mannerisms and repro- 
 
62 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 duce defects, aud perhaps superficial 
 merits; but the most valuable qualities, 
 those that have their roots iu character, 
 he will miss altogether, except in so far 
 as his own personality resembles that of 
 his model. It has been found compar- 
 atively easy, for instance, to copy the big 
 words, the antitheses, the balanced sen- 
 tences of Dr. Johnson ; but who has his 
 sense and his vigor? Carlyle's uncouth- 
 ness has been caught; but who has his 
 imagination, his humor, his strength ? 
 Macaulay's clearness. Goldsmith's ease, 
 Webster's massiveness, is precisely that 
 thing in each which it is most difiicult 
 to acquire. 
 
 One may, however, get good from a 
 master of English by unconscious ab- 
 sorption, as one acquires good-manners 
 by associating with gentlemen and la- 
 dies; and there are minds which are 
 
ENGLISH IJST SCHOOLS. G3 
 
 SO thoroughly original that they assim- 
 ilate from another's writings that, and 
 that only, which is helpful to them. A 
 writer of this class does not copy the 
 style of the author he has been study- 
 ing, but he reproduces that style com- 
 bined with somethino' new, so as to form 
 an original product. Thus Keats prof 
 ited by his study of Spenser and of Mil- 
 ton. Thus Demosthenes, after copying 
 and recopying Thucydides, wrote, not in 
 the style of Thucydides, but in a style of 
 his own. Thus Fi'anklin educated him- 
 self by a study of Addison, rewriting the 
 best papers in The Spectator from mem- 
 ory, and then comparing his transcripts 
 with the originals; but Franklin's style, 
 though resembling Addison's in some 
 respects, is instinct with Franklin's own 
 personality. 
 
 A teacher cannot be expected to find 
 
64: OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 many excellent writers among the chil- 
 dren that pass through his hands; but 
 he may do much for his pupils by help- 
 ing them to see in their own composi- 
 tions, not only how far they have suc- 
 ceeded and how far they have failed to 
 secure unity in structure and ease in ex- 
 pression, but also how far they have suc- 
 ceeded or failed to put their individual- 
 ity into their written words. 
 
 Not that one young person in ten 
 thousand has anything original to say; 
 but every human being has a mind of 
 his own, as he has features of his own, — 
 a mind which expresses itself readily 
 enough in his face and in familiar con- 
 versation, and which can be helped to 
 express itself with the pen. To the ex- 
 tent that a young writer means to say 
 something of his own, what he writes 
 will have freshness, and will inspire in- 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 65 
 
 terest in his subject and in him. To the 
 extent that he fails to put himself into 
 his work, he becomes what is known as 
 a hack writer, a mere beast of burden, 
 that serves as a common carrier for the 
 thoughts of other men. 
 
 Thus far I have dwelt upon the study 
 of Eno;lish as a means of facilitatins: com- 
 munication between mind and mind, 
 and it is under this aspect alone that I 
 feel justified in demanding a pre-eminent 
 place for the study in every school, what- 
 ever its other objects, whatever its grade, 
 whatever its system of education. 
 
 I should be the last to deny the pleas- 
 ures or the advantages of the study of 
 English from the philological or from the 
 literary point of view. Few pursuits are 
 more attractive to an intelligent youth 
 than that of tracing a word through all 
 5 
 
QQ OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 the stages of its growth back to the root 
 out of which so much and so many things 
 have been develo23ed. To master the 
 lano-uao-es from which our own has been 
 formed is to add to our knowledo-e of 
 history, and to enable us to appreciate 
 more highly the beauty and the power 
 of the stream which we have traced to its 
 source. If pursued in this spirit, the 
 study of English as a language may be 
 of great value, both because it supplies 
 valuable information, and because it 
 broadens the mind and stimulates the 
 imagination ; but it would be hard to 
 prove that, on the w^hole, English in this 
 sense has stronger claims upon a stu- 
 dent's attention than Greek or Latin, 
 French or German, Sanskrit or Hebrew. 
 A stronger case may be made for the 
 study of English literature as such. It 
 is unseemly that anybody (except, per- 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 67 
 
 haps, a professor of Greek), should know 
 Homer better than Shakspere, Lucian 
 than Swift, Demosthenes than Burke. 
 Whatever else may be omitted, every 
 scholar who gets beyond the three R's 
 should know something of the great Eng- 
 lish classics, at first hand, — a study very 
 different from " Eng-lish literature " as 
 presented in manuals made np of short 
 extracts and loaded down with superflu- 
 ous commentaries, annotations, criticisms, 
 — talk ahout books, which rises like a 
 cloud between them and the student, 
 irritatins: him as well as obstructing: the 
 view. Better leave boys to read good 
 books by themselves than impose on 
 them as a task an author whom they 
 might enjoy if presented in the right 
 way, but whom they are likely to detest 
 if they see him only when he is pinned 
 to the floor of the school - room, like 
 
•^J- 
 
 68 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 Gulliver in the Lands of the Lillipu- 
 tians. 
 
 In this matter the only suggestions I 
 have space for are three: First, every 
 book chosen for reading should be suit- 
 ed to a scholar's age, attainments, and 
 tastes, — should be a book that he is like- 
 ly to enjoy. Secondly, he should be en- 
 couraged to read every work through 
 twice, — the first time as rapidly as pos- 
 sible, that he may get the knowledge and 
 the pleasure of it as a whole; the sec- 
 ond time with some attention to details. 
 Thirdly, in order to bring his mind to 
 bear on what he has read, he should 
 k/ write on at least two subjects drawn 
 from the book, — the first calling for a 
 general summary of its contents from a 
 single point of view, the second calling 
 for an intelligent account of one scene or 
 character. 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 69 
 
 Whether, as mere matter of knowleclQ-e, 
 the masterpieces of English literature 
 should constitute a part of the education 
 of every child who goes beyond the pri- 
 mary school, I will not undertake to say; 
 but I do regard an acquaintance with the 
 English classics as an imjDortant if not an 
 indispensable means of acquiring the art 
 of expressing one's thoughts thoroughly 
 well. This purpose good authors serve, 
 not only directly by providing suitable 
 topics to be written on, and by increas- 
 ing one's command of language, but also 
 indirectly by stimulating the mental en- 
 ergies, and by affording a keen intellect- 
 ual pleasure. Thus understood, Eng- 
 lish literature ceases to be a merely lit- 
 erary study, and becomes as useful to 
 the man of science as to the man of let- 
 ters — to Professor Huxley and Mr. Her- 
 bert Spencer as to Mr. Kuskin and Mr. 
 
TO OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 James Russell Lowell. Literature is no 
 longer a fund of information which may 
 be weighed against information on other 
 subjects, but it belongs to that kind of 
 knowledge which is power. 
 
 The primary object, then, of placing 
 English upon a better basis in the schools, 
 and of giving more time and intelligence 
 to it there, is to enable boys and girls 
 to express themselves in pure and effect- 
 ive language : not merely that they may 
 avoid gross mistakes in grammar, and 
 ambiguous or obscure expressions, not 
 merely that they may state facts or opin- 
 ions in words that can be understood by 
 one who takes pains to understand them; 
 but that, in course of time, they may tell 
 a story or frame an argument so well 
 that he who runs will stop to read ifc, 
 and that they may be able, the best of 
 them at least, not only to instruct men, 
 
ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS. 71 
 
 but also to please them in tlie highest 
 sense, and to move them to noble ends. 
 It may be years befoi'e the full effects 
 of the reform will appear ; but then they 
 will be felt in all the fields of human 
 activity in which English plays a leading 
 part. 
 
11. 
 
 ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 
 
 In most, if not all, American colleges, 
 the teaching of English stands better 
 than it did ten years ago. English is 
 no longer looked down upon, no longer 
 deemed unworthy to be on the same 
 footing with Latin, Greek, and mathe- 
 matics. It is recognized as forming, and 
 as deserving to form, an important part 
 of the higher education ; and this recog- 
 nition has stimulated teachers already in 
 the profession to better work, and has 
 recruited their ranks with young men 
 and women of ability and enthusiasm. 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 73 
 
 In some shape, English now has an 
 honored place in every institution which 
 is, or pretends to be, a college or a uni- 
 versity ; but in this curriculum it means 
 one thing, in that another. Some insti- 
 tutions class English with French and 
 German, Italian and Spanish, under the 
 head of modern languages; and the advo- 
 cates of the study in this sense are fond 
 of pitting the modern languages against 
 the ancient ones, or of using English 
 alone as a weapon to brain Greek with. 
 Some institutions require all their stu- 
 dents to give many hours to Anglo- 
 Saxon, apparently on the ground that 
 the earlier the English the purer and the 
 better worth knowing it is, and the more 
 barren the literature the less the prob- 
 ability that a student will be diverted 
 by some literary ignis fatuus from the 
 study of the forms of words. Others, 
 
74 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 which do not take this extreme view 
 
 neglect every English author since Shak- 
 spere, as if he were the latest one worth 
 studying, or devote themselves to Mr. 
 Browning, as to the Shakspere of the 
 nineteenth century. There are teach- 
 ers who identify English with rhetoric 
 taught as a science, — that is, as matter 
 of knowledge valuable, not for the use 
 to be made of it, but for its own sake; 
 others identify it with rhetoric taught 
 as an art composed of certain princi- 
 ples, which they strive to apply to the 
 essays of their pupils ; others content 
 themselves with demanding a large num- 
 ber of essays from each student, but 
 make no provision for the study of prin- 
 ciples, whether as formulated in a text- 
 book on rhetoric or as embodied in lit- 
 erature ; and there are some who treat 
 " forensic disputation," or even " ora- 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 75 
 
 tory," " vocal expression," as the English 
 most important to know. 
 
 In each of these fields admirable woi'k 
 has been done, no doubt; but to get the 
 ofood of it all, an enthusiastic student of 
 Eno^lish would have to betake himself 
 to several centres of intellectual life. No 
 college in the country, so far as I know, 
 gives instruction on all matters included 
 in the study of English in its widest 
 sense. None provides the requisite fa- 
 cilities for a student who desires to mas- 
 ter his mother-tongue in its history as a 
 language, in its completeness as a litera- 
 ture, and in its full scope as a means 
 of expression with the pen and the 
 lips. This state of things is not, and has 
 not been for many years, the case with 
 Greek, Latin, or mathematics. It is no 
 longer the case with some branches of 
 natural science, or with at least two of 
 
76 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 the modern languages. Why sliould it 
 he so with English ? Why should a man 
 who wishes to know all that is to be 
 known about the language he is going 
 to use all his life, be at a disadvantage 
 in the pursuit of his favorite species of 
 knowledge, as compared with him w^hose 
 tastes lead him to regions which only a 
 few specialists care to enter? 
 
 The question answers itself There is 
 every reason why every college in the 
 country should do for the mother-tongue 
 all that it does for its most fovored 
 studies; and the time will come, or I 
 greatly misread tlie signs of the future, 
 when no American institution of learn- 
 ins: can afford to economize in the mat- 
 ter of Eno;lish. Now that learned men 
 and learned bodies, like clergymen and 
 churches, are no longer too far above 
 the rest of the world to be subjected to 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 77 
 
 the same tests to which other men and 
 other bodies are subjected, and to be 
 criticised with equal freedom, they must 
 cease to devote the resources supplied 
 by public or by private beneficence to 
 the nourishment of hobby-horses whose 
 bones are marrowless, in whose eyes 
 there is either no speculation in the old 
 sense of that word, or too much spec- 
 ulation in the modern sense. A colleges 
 which is to live by the people must 
 supply the education needed for the peo- 
 ple, and for the leaders of the people ; 
 and what is so much needed as Enirlish? 
 In these days of multifarious knowledge, 
 of intellectual activity in so many direc- 
 tions, there are things of w^hich a man 
 need know the rudiments only : but of 
 English an educated man should know 
 more than the rudiments, because — if for 
 no other reason — everybody knows, or 
 
Y8 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 half- knows, or thinks he knows them; 
 because everybody deems himself capa- 
 ble, not only of criticising the English 
 of others, but also of writing good Eng- 
 lish himself. Therefore, educated men 
 should arm themselves at all points 
 against the numerous foes that beset 
 pure English on every side, in these days 
 of free speech and a free press. No- 
 blesse oblige. Superior advantages bind 
 those who have enjoyed them to superior 
 achievement in the things in which self 
 taught men are their competitors, as well 
 as in the work of scholarship. 
 
 Taking for granted, then, that English 
 should form an important part of every 
 college curriculum, and should be a pre- 
 scribed study for all students in every 
 college in which any subject is prescribed, 
 we have still to ask whether the objec- 
 tive point towards which the work as a 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 79 
 
 whole ought to tend, should be English 
 as lauo:uao:e,Eno^lish as literature, or Ens:- 
 lish as a means of communication between 
 man and man. Not that it is either prac- 
 ticable or desirable to teach English in 
 one sense without teachino; it in the oth- 
 er senses also. Students of a language 
 cannot go far w^ithout taking up the lit- 
 erature in which that lano^uao^e finds its 
 most characteristic expression ; students 
 of a literature cannot fail to note some 
 of the peculiarities of the language it is 
 written in, and are likely to have some 
 curiosity as to points in the history and 
 development of language in general; stu- 
 dents of the art of comjDOsition will be 
 greatly helped in their work if they know 
 the exact meaning of the words, and are 
 familiar with the classics, of their native 
 tongue; and students, whether of lan- 
 guage or of literature, can do little with 
 
80 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 the results of their labors, unless they 
 are able to communicate them to others 
 clearly and effectively. 
 
 What, however, should be the primary 
 aim in a course of study framed to sup- 
 ply the needs, not of specialists, but of 
 the main body of students ? Should the 
 purpose be to make them know English 
 as philologists know it? or as literary 
 historians and critics know it? or as it 
 is known by those who say what they 
 wish to say, w^hether in speech or in 
 writing, in such a fashion that the per- 
 sons addressed shall readily and fully 
 and exactly understand what is meant, 
 and shall see that which speaker or writer 
 desires them to see as vividly, follow a 
 narrative or a piece of reasoning as close- 
 ly, and feel the force of argument or of 
 emotion as strongly and deeply, as it is 
 in the power of language to make them? 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 81 
 
 Can there be any doubt on this ques- 
 tion in the mind of anybody who looks 
 at it with unprejudiced eyes — the ques- 
 tion, it is to be borne in mind, rehating 
 to prescribed studies solely ? Every 
 student who chooses to pursue the his- 
 tory of the English language as far back 
 as books will take him, and every stu- 
 dent who chooses to devote his whole 
 time to the study of English literature, 
 whether in its general outlines or in its 
 minutest details, should have all the op- 
 portunities and all the facilities for 
 his specialty that his college can sup- 
 ply. In optional studies there should 
 be no discrimination, no favoritism ; so 
 far as possible, every reasonable demand 
 for instruction in any subject should be 
 granted : but a prescribed curriculum, 
 which is necessarily limited on every side, 
 should comprise those subjects only whicli 
 6 
 
82 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 fiirnisli the greatest good to the greatest 
 number. 
 
 Among these subjects the art of com- 
 position should surely be included, rath- 
 er than philology or literary history, or 
 even literature except so far as it serves 
 to stimulate the powers of production, 
 and to turn them in the risirht direction. 
 Rhetoric may be prescribed, not for its 
 own sake, but as one of the means by 
 which a student is tau£>:ht to w^rite. 
 Knowledge of the principles of the art 
 of composition, as applied by the best 
 writers, ought to help a student to com- 
 municate what he has to say in a bet- 
 ter form than he would otherwise em- 
 ploy. By the shortcomings of others he 
 should learn what to avoid, and by their 
 achievements what to seek, in his own 
 compositions. What the text-book helps 
 him to do consciously familiai'ity with 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 83 
 
 superior writers ought to help liim to do 
 unconsciously. Surrendering himself to 
 the influence of genius, he will be carried 
 beyond himself, his mind will work more 
 freely than usual, and his sentences will 
 reproduce his thoughts in more perspicu- 
 ous and more telling language. No mind 
 can fail to be stimulated by contact with 
 greater minds, whether living or dead. 
 Shakspere, Bacon, Burke, George Eliot, 
 Cardinal Newman feed the powers of 
 thought and the powers of expression at 
 the same time, and thus enable one to 
 think, to talk, and to write to more pur- 
 pose. 
 
 If, then, we may assume that English in 
 the form of English composition should 
 be a prescribed subject in every college 
 curriculum in which any subject is pre- 
 scribed, we have next to consider what 
 may and what may not be profitably 
 
84: OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 done by a teacher of this onerous and 
 often thankless subject. On this matter 
 two extreme theories are held : one, that 
 a teacher can do nothing ; the other, that 
 a teacher can do everything. 
 
 According to the do-nothing school, 
 " To learn how to write, you have only 
 to write;" "When you have something 
 to say, you will be able to say it well 
 enough;" "A clear thinker will be a 
 clear writer, a forcible thinker a forcible 
 writer;" and so on. Those who favor 
 this view admit, indeed, that an intelli- 
 gent critic may uproot faults of style, 
 repress bad tendencies, smooth rough 
 places; but they add that he is likely 
 to kill the wheat with the tares, to dis- 
 couraQ:e inclinations in the rio-ht direc- 
 tion, to cultivate elegance at the cost of 
 strength, and, above all, to make a young 
 writer self-conscious, self- critical, and, 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 85 
 
 therefore, more and more artificial, — the 
 effort to follow rules and avoid faults 
 depriving him of the inspiration and the 
 guidance that would otherwise have been 
 furnished by his own healthy, natural 
 self. They declare that under such dis- 
 cipline an original writer, or one who 
 mio-ht have become such if left to him- 
 self, is reduced almost to the level of an 
 accomplished proof-reader. They point 
 to authors of acknowledged merit who 
 never received any instruction in Eng- 
 lish comj^osition, and to youths whose 
 written w^ork in college was rated very 
 low, but who soon after leaving college 
 showed that they could express them- 
 selves so well as to command attention 
 to what they wrote on subjects with 
 which they were familiar and in which 
 they took a living interest. 
 
 In this view there is, no doubt, a ker- 
 
86 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 nel of trutb. Bad instruction is worse 
 than none. A teacher who confines his 
 efi'orts to the eradication of faults is 
 likely to do more harm by discourage- 
 ment than he does good by emendation : 
 but the wise teacher will constantly en- 
 deavor to make the soil he cultivates 
 as productive as possible, taking pains 
 all the time to quicken the good seed, 
 and to help his pupils to understand 
 that weeds are removed, not so much 
 because they are weeds as because they 
 choke the wheat. Even such a teacher 
 may at first seem to be doing more harm 
 than good to his pupils; for a novice 
 has to pass through a period of transi- 
 tion, during which, like a boy who has 
 taken half a dozen lessons in dancing, 
 he is awkwardly conscious of his short- 
 comings, but does not know how to im- 
 prove. In a few weeks, however, a 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 87 
 
 teaclier who combines tact with com- 
 mon - sense will be able to do for his 
 pupils, or rather to help them to do for 
 themselv^es, what great writers who had 
 no instructors did for themselves; and 
 the young men under him need not wait 
 till they get out of college before writing 
 good English. 
 
 The do-everything school, on the other 
 hand, talk as if it were the duty of an 
 instructor in English composition, not 
 merely to help a pupil to make what he 
 has to say tell for all it is worth, but 
 also to supply him with something worth 
 saying; not only, if I may use the ex- 
 pression, to make a silk purse out of a 
 sow's ear, but to fill it with gold fresh 
 from the mint. Some who do not go 
 quite to this length in their demands 
 upon the teacher of English, neverthe- 
 less do expect his mill to produce "fin- 
 
88 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 ished writers," whatever may have been 
 put into the hopper. "Why," ask the 
 men of this school, " why, if the colleges 
 do their duty, have we so few great 
 writers in this country? Why are so 
 few of the men who do good w^ork with 
 the pen college-bred ? Surely the teach- 
 ers of English either slumber at their 
 posts, or 
 
 " * painful vigils keep, 
 Sleepless themselves to give their [pupils] sleep.' " 
 
 In this view too, there is a kernel of 
 truth. No teacher should ignore the 
 fact that good English with next to 
 nothing behind it is sounding brass or 
 a tinkling cymbal — the brass of loud- 
 mouthed declaim ers or the tinkle of soft- 
 mouthed poetasters. A teacher should 
 make his pupils understand that they 
 must think before writing, must have 
 something clearly in view which they 
 
ENGLISH m COLLEGES. 89 
 
 are to put into language; but it is not 
 Lis business as teacher of composition 
 to provide them with materials. He 
 may do so if he will ; but, other things 
 being equal, young writers do better 
 with topics that interested them before 
 they thought of writing upon them than 
 with those imposed as subjects of com- 
 position, with knowledge gathered as 
 knowledge rather than as so much grist 
 for the English mill. So far as possi- 
 ble, a teacher should open the eyes of 
 his pupils to the materials at their com- 
 mand, and should make those already in 
 their possession into as good an article 
 as possible. If the materials are meagre, 
 it is his misfortune, not his fault; and he 
 will make a poor use of his talents if 
 he shows young men how to hide pov- 
 erty of thought in " finish " of style. 
 In my judgment, the work of a college 
 
90 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 instructor iu English composition is, in- 
 deed, limited in range, but is very im- 
 portant within its range. All that is 
 done for the more advanced classes in 
 the preparatory schools he should do, 
 and more; for with the maturing facul- 
 ties of students come new dangers and 
 difficulties for them, and new duties and 
 responsibilities for their teacher. Though 
 it is not his office to provide his pupils 
 wdth materials for thought^, he may well 
 show them how and where to look for 
 materials, how to test them when found, 
 how to choose those that will best serve 
 the purpose in hand, and how to mar- 
 shal them for service. Though it is not 
 his office to provide his pupils with ma- 
 chinery for thinking or to keep what 
 machinery they have in running order, 
 he may well assist them to use it to the 
 best advantage. 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 91 
 
 One of his most important duties is to 
 prevent the young men and women un- 
 der his eye from running into extremes. 
 He should keep them in the difficult 
 channel between the Scylla which wrecks 
 the "used up" youth who says of life 
 what the man in the play says of the 
 crater of Vesuvius, "there's nothing in 
 it," and the Chary bdis which boils about 
 the hot little fellow who goes at the 
 criticism of a book or the discussion 
 of a controverted question with — if I 
 may change the figure — a warwhoop 
 and a tomahawk. He should discour- 
 age his pupils from announcing plati- 
 tudes as if they were oracles, and from 
 apologizing for them as if they were orig- 
 inal sin ; from dealing with a moral 
 question either as if they had long ago 
 lost their relish for cakes and ale, or as 
 if there were nothing but cakes and ale 
 
92 OUR .ENGLISH. 
 
 worth living for; from writing stories 
 that strive to be original, and succeed in 
 being morbid or grotesque, or that out- 
 realist modern realists in the trivialities 
 they photograph and in their ostenta- 
 tious lack of plot and denouement ; from 
 the extra - dry, the sweet, the still, and 
 the sparkling brands of dulness; from 
 poverty of language and of imagination, 
 and from heaping words upon words 
 until what passes for thought has been 
 smothered, or metaphor upon metaphor 
 until one cannot find the idea, if idea 
 there be, for the illustrations ; from arid 
 metaphysical subtleties, and vague scien- 
 tific or religious generalities, from ped- 
 antry of every kind and vulgarity of 
 every stripe. 
 
 In colleges, as in schools, however, the 
 main business of the teacher of English 
 must be with the art of composition 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 93 
 
 strictly understood, the art wliicb tells 
 students how to communicate what is in 
 their heads and hearts so that it shall 
 go for all that it is worth. To this end 
 he should strive, in the first place, to 
 stimulate their minds, so that they may 
 put forth their full powers when they 
 write, and put them forth naturally and 
 with the force of their individuality; 
 and, in the second place, he should, so 
 far as in him lies, remove the obstruc- 
 tions which ignorance, half- knowledge, 
 bad training, mannerism, self-conscious- 
 ness, imitation of poor models, the thou- 
 sand and one forces that fight against 
 good English, place between the thought 
 and its free and natural expression. 
 
 Over some of these obstacles a stu- 
 dent's mental energy will, if roused to 
 its full power, carry him by its own mo- 
 mentum ; for, as every one knows, a writer 
 
94 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 has the best chance of saying what he 
 means to say, and only that, if he is ab- 
 sorbed in the matter of what he is writ- 
 ing, and gives no conscious attention to 
 the forms of words or the construction 
 of sentences. The more firmly his mind 
 grasps the subject in hand, and the more 
 rapidly his train of thought moves, the 
 more probable it is that he will hit upon 
 the best w^ords and the best arrange- 
 ment of words. 
 
 If a teacher, then, is able to interest 
 his pupils in w^hat they are writing so 
 deeply that they put their best selves 
 into the work, he will succeed, not only 
 in giving to it continuity and individual- 
 ity not otlierwise to be attained, but also 
 in diminishing the number of errors and 
 defects. Those which remain should be 
 dealt w^ith firmly but considerately. A 
 student should be made to feel that they 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 95 
 
 are removed in order that the free flow 
 of his thought may be unimpeded, and 
 that they are of no account as compared 
 with lack of life and of unity in the 
 composition as a whole. 
 
 Every teacher will decide for himself 
 how to stimulate his pupils. The means 
 are as various as the conditions of life 
 and the idiosyncrasies of human nature. 
 What is one man's meat is another man's 
 poison. What is successful with a small 
 class will fail with a large one. In all 
 cases, and under all conditions, the one 
 thins: needful is that the teacher should 
 have the power to awaken interest and 
 inspire enthusiasm. If he does not throw 
 himself into his work, the minds of his 
 pupils will be cold. They must catch 
 fire from him. 
 
 Under the most favorable conditions, 
 the results of English composition as 
 
96 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 practised iu college are, it must be con- 
 fessed, discouraging. The shadow of gen- 
 erations of perfunctory writers seems to 
 rest upon the paper, and only here and 
 there is it broken by a ray of light from 
 the present. In place of the Sopho- 
 moric spirit with which themes were 
 possessed a generation ago, the spirit of 
 Indifference seems to have entered into 
 them. Sometimes the ghosts of half-read 
 books or of half-heard lectures haunt the 
 dismal pages. Sometimes the spectre of 
 Pessimism, stalking through a student's 
 mind, lays a withered hand upon his pen, 
 and blasts it into sterility, or scares it 
 into hysterics. I know of no language 
 — ancient or modern, civilized or savage 
 — so insufficient for the purposes of lan- 
 guage, so dreary and inexpressive, as 
 theme-language in the mass. How two 
 or three hundred young men who seem 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 97 
 
 to be really alive as they appear in the 
 flesh can have kept themselves entirely 
 out of their writing, it is impossible to 
 understand — impossible for the instruc- 
 tor who has read their productions by 
 the thousand, or for the graduate who 
 looks at his own compositions ten years 
 after leaving college. 
 
 Perhaps the most potent cause of this 
 deplorable state of things has been the 
 practice of forcing young men to write 
 on topics of which they know nothing 
 and care to know nothing — topics, more- 
 over, that present no salient point for 
 their minds to take hold of An im- 
 provement (for improvement there is) 
 has been noticed since students have been 
 given greater freedom in the choice of 
 subjects, have been told to choose topics 
 which have already engaged their atten- 
 tion, and to limit and define the topics 
 7 
 
98 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 they choose so as to keep themselves 
 strictly to one line of thought — whether 
 in discussing a proposition clearly stated, 
 in arranging facts in accordance with 
 some principle, or in telling a story or 
 describino; a scene in a coherent and 
 vivid manner. 
 
 I have found, too, that most young 
 men do better under pressure than when 
 left to their own devices as to time and 
 space. Such, at least, is my experience 
 with a class of from twenty to thirty sen- 
 iors and juniors, a part of whose daily 
 work consists of papers a page long, writ- 
 ten in the class-room. No manuscript is 
 to be brought in ; but students are ad- 
 vised to choose their subjects beforehand, 
 and to find out exactly what they want 
 to say. Any subject will answer ; but 
 they are urged to avoid the common- 
 place, the bookish, the technical, and the 
 
ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 99 
 
 profound, and to choose topics whicli can 
 be disposed of within the prescribed lim- 
 its. At first, " Time up " appears at the 
 end of many manuscri2:)ts, the writers 
 having undertaken more than they can 
 accomplish within the ten minutes al- 
 lowed ; but experience soon shows each 
 man what can and what cannot be put 
 into a paragraph, and practice gives fa- 
 cility in composition. Having no space 
 for prefaces or digressions or perorations, 
 the members of the class usually begin 
 at the beginning and go straight to the 
 end. Having no time to be affected, they 
 are simple and natural. Theme-language, 
 which still haunts too many of their 
 longer essays, rarely appears in the ten- 
 minute papers. Free from faults of one 
 kind or another these papers are not; 
 but the faults ar^ such as would be com- 
 mitted in conversation or in familiar cor- 
 
100 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 respondeiice. The great point Las been 
 gained that the writers, as a rule, forget 
 themselves in what they are saying ; and 
 the time will come, it is to be hoped, 
 when they will be correct as well as flu- 
 ent, and will unite vigor with well-bred 
 ease, and clearness in thought with com- 
 pactness in expression. 
 
 Teachers of English composition, 
 whether they have or have not had an 
 experience like that which I have de- 
 tailed, must all have seen good results 
 follow a rigid observance of rules limit- 
 ing essays to a certain number of pages, 
 and requiring them at a fixed hour. All 
 must have seen the advantage to the stu- 
 dent of making him feel the ]3ressure of 
 a force outside of himself All must 
 know too that such pressure, however 
 useful as an educational expedient, is a 
 poor substitute for the self control which 
 
1 1, ' ' ' > 
 
 •>' J ■> 1 > 
 1 > ' 
 
 ENGLISH IN COLLEGES. 101 
 
 ' ' ' ' 5 -.' > ' < 
 
 > 1 5 5 ' ' ' > >, 
 
 
 a young man old enough to be in college 
 should exercise in the matter of writing, 
 as in other things. Undergraduates are 
 fond of talking about the impossibility 
 of crowding all that they have to say 
 into a prescribed number of pages, or 
 of getting their work ready at the pre- 
 scribed time; they complain of what they 
 stigmatize as a system of " repression ;" 
 they are sure that to do themselves jus- 
 tice they must wait for a " mood," an 
 "inspiration," and must give it free course 
 when it comes. Sooner or later, they will 
 discover that the best work in the world 
 is done under conditions, imposed from 
 without or self-imposed, and that the 
 best writers in their several kinds — fi'om 
 Shakspere to a successful journalist — find 
 the conditions under which they labor a 
 help rather than a hinderance. 
 
III. 
 
 ENGLISH m NEWSPAPERS AND 
 
 NOVELS. 
 
 "The best rule of reading," says Emer- 
 son, " will be a method from nature, and 
 not a mechanical one of hours and pages. 
 It holds each student to a pursuit of his 
 native aim, instead of a desultory mis- 
 cellany. Let him read what is proper 
 to him, and not waste his memory on a 
 crowd of mediocrities. . . . Perhaps the 
 human mind would be a gainer if all 
 the secondary writers were lost — say, in 
 England, all but Shakespeare, Milton, 
 and Bacon, through the profounder 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 103 
 
 study SO drawn to those w^onderful 
 minds. With this pilot of his own gen- 
 ius, let the student read one, or let him 
 read many, he will read advantageous- 
 ly. .. . The three practical rules, then, 
 which I have to offer are : 1. Never 
 read any book that is not a year old. 
 
 2. Never read any but famed books. 
 
 3. Never read any but what you like; 
 or, in Shakespeare's phrase, 
 
 ' No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en : 
 In brief, sir, study what you most affect.' " 
 
 How^ few of us live up to the last of 
 these three rules ! Books which we do 
 not enjoy, it may be necessary to read 
 for an ulterior purpose; but how many 
 of us waste time upon reading that 
 gives neither pleasure nor profit ! How 
 many dawdle over books, with minds 
 half asleep, in a half-hearted effort to do 
 
104 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 what, for no sufficient reason, appears to 
 be a duty ! 
 
 The rule never to read a book that 
 one does not like is, then, with proper 
 qualifications, a good rule ; but what of 
 Emerson's other rules — to read no book 
 that is not a year old, and to read none 
 but famed books ? Who confines his 
 reading to Shakspere, Milton, and Bacon, 
 as Emerson seems to advise? Is it, on 
 the whole, desirable to shut our eyes to 
 the writings that record the events and 
 mirror the life of to-day ? 
 
 The bare statement of these questions, 
 which I will not stop to discuss, suggests 
 some of the difficulties in the way of car- 
 rying the first and the second of Emer- 
 son's rules into practice. What great 
 writer — not to speak of ordinary men — 
 ever did carry them into practice ? Shak- 
 spere, Bacon, and Milton, at any rate. 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 105 
 
 did not refuse to read books not a 
 year old. If ever men knew the world, 
 they did. Emerson himself may or may 
 not have read the newspapers with his 
 own eyes, but he certainly read them 
 with the eyes of other men : he frequent- 
 ly freshened his mind by visits to the 
 city, and by conversation which drew 
 him into the currents of the present. 
 
 We may, then, hesitate to accept Emer- 
 son's rules in the form in which he states 
 them ; but his doctrine, taken as a whole, 
 is sound. To read books in which one 
 takes no pleasure is, in the great ma- 
 jority of cases, a w^aste of time; and if, 
 in spite of continued disgust, the prac- 
 tice be persisted in, it is likely to be- 
 come worse than a waste of time ; for 
 it tends to cramp the free pLay of the 
 mind^ and to make reading a mechanical 
 process instead of a life-giving power. 
 
106 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 To read nothing but newspapers and 
 second-rate novels is to waste the " mem- 
 ory on a crowd of mediocrities :" and it 
 becomes worse than a waste of memory 
 and of time if the practice be persisted 
 in, without an effort to like something 
 better; for such reading tends to weak- 
 en the powers of attention and of con- 
 centration, to diminish, if not to destroy, 
 freshness of thought and individuality 
 of expression, and to relax the mental 
 fibre. 
 
 If new^spapers and novels had only a 
 general effect upon a reader's mind, 
 they would still be likely to injure his 
 English ; but they have a direct and 
 specific influence upon his use of lan- 
 guage, — an influence more wide-spread, 
 more insidious, and more harmful than 
 any other; and this is especially true 
 in the United States, where almost every 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 107 
 
 man has his daily, or, at least, his week- 
 ly journal, and almost every woman 
 spends many hours on current fiction."^ 
 
 To meet the enormous demand, a host 
 of writers have entered the field, who 
 are neither by nature nor by education 
 well -equipped for work with the pen, 
 but who, nevertheless, earn a decent 
 livelihood in this calling, as they would 
 do in any other to which they might 
 turn their flexible minds. Even writers 
 who have literary talent, but lack moral 
 stamina, are tempted not to take pains, 
 because they perceive that bad wares 
 are at least as popular as good ones. 
 
 "^"The women, in fact," writes Mr. Howells, 
 " are the miscellaneous readers in our country ; 
 they make or unmake or leave unmade most lit- 
 erary reputations ; and I believe that it is usually 
 bv their advice when their work-worn fathers and 
 husbands turn from their newspapers to the doubt- 
 ful pleasure." 
 
108 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 " It seems a pity," said a gentlen3an 
 the other day to the proprietor of a 
 daily journal, " that you should not pub- 
 lish more intelligent and better-written 
 notices of new books." 
 
 " Oh, they're as good as our readers 
 want," was the answer. 
 
 " My wife," said another gentleman to 
 the editor of Tlie Evening Muffin^ " en- 
 joys reading 3^0 ur paper." 
 
 "I should be better pleased to hear 
 that your cook liked it." 
 
 Such stories would seem to indicate 
 that some American journals, are con- 
 ducted on princijDles similar to those to 
 which Mr. Thomas Frost (in " Keminis- 
 cences of a Country Journalist," 1886), 
 ascribes the " o-rowino; deterioration of 
 journalistic work " in England. " The 
 diffusion of elementary knowledge," says 
 he, " which flooded mercantile offices 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 109 
 
 Avitli clerks whose qualifications were lim- 
 ited to the ability to write legibly and 
 add up columns of figures, has, for sev- 
 eral years past, had the result of overrun- 
 ning the reporterial [_sic] market with 
 lads whose sole qualification for reporting 
 is the knowledge of short-hand. As a rule, 
 these young gentlemen are ignorant of 
 grammar, in many instances cannot spell 
 correctly, know little or nothing of mod- 
 ern history, the knowledge of which is 
 essential to a journalist, and whenever 
 condensation is required are apt to make 
 their sentences unintellisfible. Their em- 
 plo3'ers, looking for their pecuniary gains 
 from advertisements rather than from 
 the circulation of the paper, condone 
 their deficiencies in consideration of 
 their cheapness; and in time they are 
 promoted to the editorial room, at sala- 
 ries considerably less than their predeces- 
 
110 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 sors received, and proceed to write lead- 
 ers and reviews without knowins; how 
 to construct a sentence in good literary 
 English, or even to write grammatic- 
 ally." 
 
 No such relation between emj)loyer 
 and employed as is described by Mr. 
 Frost has yet, so far as I know, grown 
 up among the persons engaged in the 
 production of English novels. There are 
 no master-novelists with journeymen at 
 work under them, as journeymen work- 
 ed for Dumas the elder. The tie be- 
 tween publisher and novelist sometimes 
 seems to be very close ; but the cases 
 are probably few in which it has serious- 
 ly affected independence of action or qual- 
 ity of work. If, however, this branch of 
 industry continues to grow as rapfdly 
 as it has done within the last halfcen- 
 tury,we may all live to see novels issued 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. Ill 
 
 by large establishments organized some- 
 what after the fashion of newspaper 
 offices. 
 
 Meantime, what we do see is a 
 " growing deterioration " in the novels 
 produced from month to month, — a de- 
 terioration brought about by general 
 causes not unlike those which tempt 
 newspaper proprietors to content them- 
 selves w^ith inferior work. If badly 
 written novels have as ready a sale as 
 well-written ones, badly written novels 
 will be supplied in abundance. In this, 
 as in every other business, skilled work- 
 men are few ; and those few, if they find 
 that their best work is not appreciated, 
 are in danger of becoming careless, or of 
 putting their skill to base uses. If they 
 resist these temptations, — as, fortunately 
 for the world, some do, — it is because 
 their ambition is not so much to c^et fort- 
 
112 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 une and fame by their books as to do 
 
 r 
 
 their best because it is their best. 
 
 In all that I say, I am, of course, speak- 
 ing, not of the ideal journal, the journal 
 that is conducted in all its departments 
 by men of culture (if such a journal there 
 be), not of the novels of Thackeray or of 
 George Eliot, but of the newspapers and 
 the novels of the day. 
 
 Even these have merits not to be 
 despised. Most of us would proba- 
 bly find it difficult to induce the edit- 
 or of a newspaper to put our thoughts 
 on the Irish question into type, or 
 the publisher of successful novels to 
 print our version of the old story of 
 Amandus and Amanda. Our contribu- 
 tions to a newspaper would probably 
 lack the very qualities that give success 
 to editorial articles, which, though far 
 from being models of good English, 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 113 
 
 suit, nevertheless, the intelligence and 
 the taste of their public ; or to para- 
 graphs from the " facile pen " of a re- 
 porter, written in language that would 
 make Addison turn in his grave, but 
 containing the facts which peoj^le want 
 to know, and stating tliem in such a 
 fashion that a havSty reader gets hold 
 of them at once. Our novels, though 
 they might not violate the rules of gram- 
 mar, or paint scenes and characters with 
 a brush too big for both subject and art- 
 ist, might, nevertheless, be deficient in 
 the art of inventing a good story and 
 of telling it in an interesting way, in 
 knowledge of human nature, and in skill 
 in construction, — not to speak of the 
 " local color " and local dialect which 
 jaded minds demand nowadays. I can- 
 not, indeed, believe, as some writers ap- 
 pear to do, that if Junius should re- 
 8 
 
114 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 appear, he would find in our newspaper 
 offices so many pens more powerful than 
 his that he would gladly withdraw into 
 obscurity again ; or that if Thackeray 
 should come back under another name, 
 he would have a cool reception from a 
 public accustomed to better work: but 
 I am sure that successful newspapers 
 and novels, with all their defects, are 
 not without merit. To say, as Anthony 
 Trollope did, in 1862, that "not a single 
 newspaper in the United States is wor- 
 thy of praise," and that " the very writ- 
 ing is below mediocrity," is grossly to 
 overstate the fiicts. 
 
 The misfortune is that it is the de- 
 fects rather than the merits, the bad 
 English rather than the good that strikes 
 the eye and sticks in the memory. Faults 
 of newspaper English rapidly spread 
 through space, — a phrase that was 
 
ENGLISH m NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 115 
 
 hatched in Texas or Oregon livins: to 
 
 o o 
 
 chii'p among the "All Sorts" of an "es- 
 teemed contemporary " in Maine, and, if 
 very bad, dying within quotation-j)oints 
 in a metropolitan journal, which cans it — 
 so to speak — for exportation as an Amer- 
 icanism. Faults of English characteris- 
 tic of novels descend from generation 
 to generation. From Scott the second- 
 rate novelist catches, — not his natural- 
 ness, vigor, manliness, invention, obser- 
 vation, skill in narration, — but his occa- 
 sional grandiloquence, commonplaceness 
 in thought, or slovenliness in expression ; 
 from Dickens, — not his vividness, pathos, 
 and knowledge of life, — but his exag- 
 gerations of nature, his eccentricities of 
 language, the alloy left in his style by 
 his early experience as reporter. What- 
 ever in Bulwer or Lord Beaconsfield is 
 pinchbeck; whatever in the Bronte sis- 
 
116 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 ters is "intense," in the modern slang 
 use of that word; whatever in Thacke- 
 ray verges on coarseness, or sentimental- 
 ity, or prolixity ; whatever in George 
 Eliot is awkward or over-scientific in 
 expression ; — is absorbed by inferior 
 writers, combined with their own weak- 
 nesses, and reproduced in surprising 
 forms. 
 
 As most novelists read newspapers, 
 and most journalists read novels, writers 
 of each class catch bad English from 
 those of the other, and adapt it to their 
 own purposes. Hence such differences 
 in the use of language as exist between 
 the two are, for the most part, trace- 
 able either to differences in subject- 
 matter, or to the fact, already adverted 
 to, that newspapers are read by more 
 men than women, and novels by more 
 women than men. 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 117 
 
 In newspapers, the tendency is to sac- 
 rifice eleo^ance and refinement to the 
 " forceful " or the " funny ;" in novels, to 
 sacrifice vigor and compactness to the 
 sentimental or the fanciful. The old- 
 fashioned newspaper, written to jDlease 
 the respectable and conservative classes, 
 abounds in sonorous or sententious 
 platitudes; in the old-fashioned novel, 
 written to please female Philistines, 
 platitudes are served wath love or re- 
 ligion, adorned with flowers of speech, 
 and flanked by descriptions of heroes 
 and heroines and of scenery. The new- 
 fashioned newspaper, being addressed to 
 a public which likes its fare hot and 
 highly spiced, abounds in slang of all 
 sorts, from that of Congress to that of 
 the prize-fight or the horse-race; the 
 new-fashioned novel, being addressed to, 
 and often written by, girls (young and 
 
118 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 old) who have more curiosity than ex- 
 perience, spices its pages plentifully 
 with French or pseudo-French, with the 
 argot of society, and with expressions 
 too risques for an ingenue. 
 
 In an age demanding brevity, novel- 
 ists eke out their stories with petty de- 
 tails that might better be left to the 
 imagination, with obvious reflections, or 
 with irrelevant digressions; journalists 
 swamp their facts or opinions in a flood 
 of words. Sentences and paragraphs 
 may be clear and vigorous, but the 
 chapter or the article as a whole is 
 often obscure and weak. The end may 
 be attached to the beofinnino^, but it is 
 not easy to get hold or to keep hold of 
 the thread of connection. 
 
 Often editorial articles — to borrow a 
 happily mixed metaphor — "smack of the 
 mill" the writer sinkino; his individu- 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 119 
 
 allty in that of the journal to which he 
 contributes. Even if he had the desire, 
 he has not the time to be himself, as he 
 has not the time to be concise. For the 
 individuality of the novelist there is a 
 better chance ; but he also is in haste to 
 get his wares on the market, and is in- 
 spired by the idols of the market-place 
 rather than by the spirit within him. If 
 one of his books makes a hit, he copies 
 and copies it until his manner becomes 
 mannerism, his heroine a doll or a cari- 
 cature, his scenery like that of the old- 
 fashioned drop-curtain. 
 
 In both novels and newspapers, pre- 
 cision in lano-uao^e and nice distinc- 
 
 o o 
 
 tions in thought are rare. Superlatives 
 abound. There is little gradation, little 
 light and shade, little of the delicate dis- 
 crimination, the patient search for truth, 
 and the conscientious effort to express 
 
120 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 truth exactly, which characterize the 
 work of a master. 
 
 To speak of offences against grammar 
 and idiom would be to go into minutiae 
 foreign to my purpose. Such offences 
 are common, as everybody knows, and 
 will be common, so long as uneducated 
 or imperfectly educated persons are at 
 liberty to handle their pens as they will, 
 without guidance or criticism. Nor is it 
 worth while to dwell either on the affec- 
 tation of employing words and phrases 
 which are no longer used in good prose, 
 or on the habit of making stale quota- 
 tions — a habit which may be studied at 
 one of its sources in some of the wn-it- 
 ings of Hazlitt, whose style, according to 
 Byron, suffered from " a cutaneous erup- 
 tion." 
 
 Newspapers and novels^ alike keep 
 
 * Most of the examples in this paper are from 
 
ENGLISH IN NEV/SPAPERS AND NOVELS. 121 
 
 "pet words" — words wdiich, like other 
 pets, are often in the way, often fill 
 places that belong to their betters. A 
 good speech is termed "breezy" or 
 "neat;"* a good style, "crisp" or "inci- 
 sive ;" an " utterance " or a comely coun- 
 tenance, " clear-cut " or " clean-cut." Bad 
 features are " accentuated " by sickness. 
 Lectures are " punctuated " with ap- 
 plause. A clergyman "jDerforms" at a 
 funeral; a musician "officiates" or "pre- 
 sides " at the piano-forte. Many things, 
 from noses to tendencies, are "pro- 
 nounced ;" many things, from a popular 
 novel to a popular nostrum, are " unique," 
 and one journal calls a thing "one of the 
 
 American publications, but some are from British 
 ones, for America does not have a monopoly of bad 
 English. 
 
 * In an account of the hanging of a husband and 
 wife by a California mob, we read, "The work was 
 quietly and neatly done." 
 
122 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 most unique;" many things, from a circus 
 to a book, have an "advent." Questions 
 are "pivotal," achievements "colossal" or 
 " monumental," books " epocli - making." 
 Every week something is "inaugurated" 
 or "initiated," and somebody or some- 
 thing is "in toucli with" somebody or 
 something else. We are often asked to 
 "await developments." A few years 
 ago newspapers were talking of A. and 
 B. " and others of the same ilk." A 
 word just now in vogue is " weird." 
 We read not only of the " weird " 
 beauty of Keats, but also of the " weird- 
 est" misconstructions of facts, or mis- 
 statements of principles. "Factor" and 
 "feature" appear in the oddest company, 
 and "environment" has become a wea- 
 riness to the spirit.'^' 
 
 ^ "I wisli," wrote Miss Austen, in 1814, to 
 her niece, " yon would not let liim [the hero of a 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 123 
 
 Some novels and most newspapers are 
 prompt to adopt the slang of the day, 
 whatever its source. We read, for ex- 
 ample, of schemes for " raking in the 
 dimes." One poetical paragraph ends, 
 " It pulls one up dreadfully in one's 
 reverie to hear," etc. Kewspajiers '' take 
 stock in " a senator, and " get to the bot- 
 tom fact" of a discussion. The hero of 
 one novel is "padded to the nines;" the 
 heroine of another has a brow, eyes, and 
 face that are all " strung up to the con- 
 cert-pitch." The journalist's candidate 
 and the novelist's hero alike " put in an 
 appearance," and " pan out well." 
 
 The disposition to obscure the mean- 
 
 novel which the niece had written] plunge into a 
 vortex of dissipation. I do not object to the thing, 
 but I cannot bear the expression ; it is such thorough 
 novel slang, and so old, that I dare say Adara met 
 with it in the first novel he opened." 
 
124: OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 ing by technical expressions is not un- 
 known in newspapers^ but it shows it- 
 self chiefly in novels. Even in "The 
 Heart of Mid-Lothian " we are told that 
 " the acid fermentation " of a dispute 
 was " at once neutralized by the power- 
 ful alkali implied in the word secret." 
 Even George Eliot, in her description of 
 Gwendolen at the beginning of "Dan- 
 iel Derouda," uses " dynamic " in a way 
 which called forth much criticism when 
 the book was published. A later nov- 
 elist talks of " neuralgia of the emo- 
 tions;" another of the "effect of the 
 meerschaum's subtle influence upon cer- 
 tain groups of ganglionic nerve - cells 
 deep in his cerebrum." Another calls 
 the hero " one of the coefficients of the 
 age;" and still another remarks that, 
 " as men gravitate towards their lead- 
 ing grievance, he went off at a tangent." 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 125 
 
 We read of fancy's taking " a tangential 
 flight;" of the " insj^iration that was to 
 co-ordinate conflicting data ;" of a man's 
 " undergoing molecular moral disintegra- 
 tion ;" of life as " being a function of 
 two variables, money and fashion ;" and 
 of death as a "common and relentless 
 factor, getting, as time went on, increas- 
 ing value in the complicated equation 
 of beinsr." 
 
 One set of faults seems to spring from 
 the belief on the part of some journal- 
 ists and novelists, and of young writ- 
 ers who have caught the malady from 
 them, that there are not enough words 
 in the English language to supply their 
 needs, and that, therefore, it is necessary 
 to coin just a few more, or at least to 
 take them from the mint of some other 
 writer of the day. Hence, new forms 
 for old words, and new formations from 
 
126 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 old words. One journal tells its readers 
 that " ' mentality/ though not in the 
 dictionaries, is a good English word." 
 Another says : " ' Christmasing;' we ought 
 to have such a word." The hero of one 
 novel is engaged in " battle-axing " diffi- 
 culties ; the heroine of another has a ter- 
 rible " disappoint." A traveller " gon- 
 doles" in Amsterdam, "hotelizes" in 
 London, and is " recepted " and " dined " 
 on his return to New York. A popular 
 writer talks of rural mechanics too idle 
 to "mechanize." ^'Burglarize" is a 
 newspaper word ; " burgled " has been 
 bori'owed for fiction from " The Pirates 
 of Penzance." We read of sounds hol- 
 low and "echoey;" of "mayoral" qual- 
 ities ; of " faddists " (people with fads) ; 
 of a bow which " grotesqued " a compli- 
 ment; of an "aborigine" (apparently 
 the singular of aborigines) ; of " cad- 
 
ENGLISH m NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 127 
 
 desses"^ and "flirtees;" of the "genius 
 of swellness;" of little fellows who 
 " cheek " biofo^er ones ; of men whose 
 good looks do not atone for the Slack- 
 ness" of their characters, and of desires 
 whicli are " wide-horizoned." It would be 
 easy to extend this list, if either ray read- 
 ers or I had the appetite to go through 
 what a recent writer terms "a menu 
 bristlino; with word-coinao^e." "There's 
 nae living," as Meg Dods, in " St.Honan's 
 
 * The history of this word is instructive. In 
 1870 it appeared in print — for the first time, so far 
 as has yet been discovered — in The Illustrated Lon- 
 don Neivs. In 1876 (in "The Prime Minister," ii., 
 xvii.) Trollope says that Lady Glencora declared that 
 she "would shake hands with no more parliament- 
 ary cads and 'caddesses' — a word which Her Grace 
 condescended to coin for her own use." In 1884 — 
 at least fourteen years after the word was first print- 
 ed — Charles Reade (in " A Perilous Secret," i., vii.) 
 felt obliired to define "caddess" as meanino- "a cad 
 of the feminine gender." 
 
128 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 Well,'' says — "there's nae liviog for 
 new words iu this new world neither, 
 and that is another vex to auld folks 
 as me." 
 
 Another characteristic of both newspa- 
 pers and novels comes sometimes from 
 the ambition to command lano^ua2:e that 
 moves in the highest circles, and some- 
 times from the determination to be fun- 
 ny. I refer, of course, to the practice of 
 usino; the lono:est and most hio^h-sound- 
 ing words and expressions — words which 
 no one would think of using in conver- 
 sation or in familiar correspondence. 
 "Scribes" of this class, as they call 
 themselves, "savor" their wine instead 
 of tastins: it, " locate " men and women 
 instead of placing them, "imbibe" or 
 " perform the rites of Bacchus," instead 
 of drinking. In the morning they " un- 
 close" the eyelids, and " j)erform the usual 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 129 
 
 operation of a diligeut friction of tLe or- 
 gans of vision f in the evening they oc- 
 cupy ^' curule cLaii's " until it is time for 
 them to "withdraw to their apartments." 
 Their spectacles are ^^ lenses;" their burg- 
 lar " reckons ujd the harvest of his hands ;" 
 their facts are "proven," their streets 
 "paven" or "semi-paven ;" the peoj)le 
 who dine at their houses are ^' commen- 
 sals," and those who ride in their cabs are 
 " incumbents." With them snow becomes 
 " white crystals " or " flufied ermine pu- 
 rity," rain "an effusion of water," crape 
 "sable insignia of death," potatoes and 
 bread " staple edibles," a dressing-case 
 " travelling arrangements;" " sales-ladies" 
 wait upon " gilded youth ;" names are 
 "retired" from visiting-cards; seats are 
 " resumed ;" souls are " perused ;" prices 
 are " altitudinous ;" a jiolitician who 
 happens to be in town blossoms into 
 9 
 
130 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 a '^ visiting statesman ;" an author " ob- 
 ligates" instead of binding himself; a 
 visitor " refreshes his olfactory organ " 
 with a pinch of snuff; a fortune quickly 
 made is said to be "as stupendously 
 large as phenomenally swift won." The 
 last citation, which is from a prominent 
 journalist, is perha^DS no worse in its 
 way than " potential liquid refresh- 
 ment," an expression used by Lord Bea- 
 consfield and copied many times since; 
 than a later novelist's remark that " the 
 footfalls of a little black mare anno- 
 tated the silence of the place," while 
 " an isolated stellulated light illu- 
 mined the snow ;" or than a clever 
 woman's designation of veteran soldiers 
 as "mutilated pages of history." Per- 
 haps, however, the palm may be carried 
 off by the novelist who speaks of " the 
 impression she gave from her little slit- 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 131 
 
 like tacit sources " — that is, apparently, 
 her eyes. 
 
 In this last characteristic, novels have, 
 perhaps, taken the lead. Instances of 
 it in its serious form are to Le found 
 even in Scott, when he is in what 
 he himself calls his "big bow-wow" 
 mood; as, "The creak of the screw-nails 
 presently announced that the lid of the 
 last mansion of mortality was in the act 
 of being secured above its tenant;" "My 
 blood throbbed to my feverish appre- 
 hension, in pulsations which resembled 
 the deep and regular strokes of a distant 
 fulling-mill, and tingled in my veins like 
 streams of liquid fire." Instances of it 
 in its humorous form are to be found 
 even in Dickens, when the reporter in 
 him gets the better of the humoi'ist; as, 
 " ligueous sharper," i, e.^ Wegg with his 
 wooden leg ; he was " accelerated to rest 
 
132 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 with a poker;" "The celebration is a 
 breakfast, because a dinner on the de- 
 sired scale of sumptuosity cannot be 
 achieved within less limits than those 
 of the non-existent palatial residence of 
 which so many people are madly envi- 
 ous." 
 
 Word -pictures, so called, sometimes 
 hang on newspaper columns ; and they 
 abound in recent novels. One author 
 declares that " God's gold " was in the 
 heroine's hair, for "it was shot through 
 with sunset sj^ikes of yellow light." An- 
 other says of the heroine that " the sun- 
 light made a rush at her rich chestnut 
 hair," and affirms that she had " white 
 teeth showing like pearls dropped in a 
 rose, and a white throat in a foam of 
 creamy laces." Another says that "the 
 moon searched out the deep-red lines" 
 in the heroine's hair, and that her lips 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 133 
 
 had "musical curves." We read of "sul- 
 try eyes flashing with the vistas of vic- 
 tory ;" of " the amber and crimson lus- 
 tres of joy;" of a sun "resting on the 
 hill like a drop of blood on an eye- 
 lid ;" of a head " with one little round 
 spot on the top reminding one of 
 what a bird's - eye view might show 
 of Drummond Lake in the Dismal 
 Swamp;" of a landscape which is "a 
 perfect symphony in brown ;" of a wom- 
 an who is " a ravishing symphony in 
 white, pale green, and gold ;" of anoth- 
 er who"clin2:s to the frinsres of niorht;" 
 of another whose " small hand, which 
 seemed to blush at its own naked beau- 
 ties, supported her head, embedded in 
 the volumes of her hair, like the fair- 
 est alabaster set in the deepest ebony ;" 
 and of another whose "soft, impotent 
 defiance flew like an angry bird, and 
 
134 OUR ENGLISH, 
 
 was transfixed on the still penetrating 
 gaze of his eyes." 
 
 Such are some of the varieties of bad 
 English to be found in newspapers and 
 novels, bad English to w^hich we are ex- 
 posed, and by which our own English 
 will be injured unless we guard it with 
 the utmost care. For the sake of our 
 English, if for no other reason, we should 
 all try to like something better than 
 reading of this class, and should persist 
 in the effort until w^e succeed. If Shak- 
 spere and Milton are distasteful, w^e may 
 try Pope or Cowper, Tennyson or Whit- 
 tier. If George Eliot is dull, we may 
 try Fielding or Hawthorne, Thackeray 
 or Charles Reade, Scott or Trollojie. 
 If Bacon seems heavy, Emerson or Lan- 
 dor is at hand. For every reader there 
 is some well-written book which he can 
 enjoy if he will, and w^hich may serve 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 135 
 
 as an antidote to the noxious effects pro- 
 duced by the novels and the newspapers 
 of the dav. * 
 
 Can we do nothing but provide an 
 antidote? Is there no way of keeping 
 the poison out of the system? If not, 
 what hope can we cherish that pure 
 English will hold its own, even as well 
 as it has done? 
 
 One thing we may be sui'e of: people 
 will not give up reading ephemeral pub- 
 lications. Such publications, on the con- 
 trary, seem destined to appear in con- 
 stantly increasing numbers, and to be 
 read more and more; foi", as time goes 
 on, people take more and more interest 
 in the world they live in. They will 
 read to-day's newspaper, however poor 
 in itself, because it has the breath of to- 
 day's life in it. They will give their at- 
 tention more readily to a clever story in 
 
136 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 the last mao^azine than to Miss Austen's 
 "Emma," because the atmosj^liere of 
 ^'Emma" is not, and that of the new 
 story is, their atmosphere. The tide sets 
 strongly one way, and it will make short 
 work of any Mrs. Partington who tries 
 to stop it with her broom. 
 
 Another thine: seems to be clear: a 
 writer who wishes to be read must have 
 something to say, and he must say it in 
 an interesting manner. People do not 
 prefer bad English to good ; but if the 
 good English is in a dull piece of writ- 
 ing, and the bad English in a clever one, 
 they will (and with reason) choose the 
 latter. 
 
 It follows that improvement in the 
 quality of current English is to be 
 brought about, if at all, not by ef- 
 forts to prevent the j)roduction or the 
 dissemination of newspapers and novels, 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPERS AND NOVELS. 137 
 
 but by raising the quality of those that 
 are produced. Men and women of cult- 
 ure and of high aims must be encour- 
 aged to write for the public. Students 
 in our colleges who look to book-making 
 or to journalism as a profession, must be 
 urged to keej) constantly in mind that 
 whatever they write should, always and 
 under all conditions, be their best;* and 
 that by best is meant, not merely Eng- 
 lish that will bear grammatical and rhe- 
 torical tests, but English that means 
 something, and means it so strongly 
 that a reader who has once begun the 
 article or the chapter feels obliged to 
 finish it. 
 
 I speak of college graduates, not be- 
 cause I believe that they have a monop- 
 
 * " He Avlio does not write as well as he can," 
 said a well-known critic, " will soon form the habit 
 of not writino' well at all." 
 
138 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 oly of good Englisli, — far fi'om it, — but 
 because of late years large numbers of 
 them liave taken to tlie pen for a living, 
 and because tliey are ex])osed to special 
 dangers. Men wliose style is the result 
 of self-directed effort will guard jealous- 
 ly wliat it lias cost them so mucli pains 
 to acquire; but the "liberally educated" 
 youth, who knows all that Murray and 
 Blair can teacli liim, is tempted, when 
 he discovers (as he is j^retty sure to 
 do) his inferiority in some respects to 
 the self-educated reporter at the desk 
 by his side wlio began life as an of- 
 fice-boy, l)ut \vho lias "the ne\vs])aper- 
 sense," and has mastered the tricks of 
 the trade — is tempted, and too often 
 yields to the temptation, to sacrifice his 
 l^^iKdish to his desire to atti'act atten- 
 tion. If, however, his English is hardy 
 enouo;!! to withstand the chillim^ influ- 
 
ENGLISH IN NEWSPArERB AND NOVELS. 139 
 
 dices tliat siirrouiul it, aiul IF lie uses 
 it, not as an end in itself, bnt as a 
 means to sometliing more important, lie 
 may not only keep it in its ]:)urity for 
 his own use, but may also make it felt 
 in his little world as a purifying and 
 inspiring force. 
 
 Even if those who serve the public, 
 wdiether in newspapers or in novels, 
 write as well as they can, it will still 
 be the plain duty of readers not to give 
 too much of their time to publications 
 that are like the llower of the field, 
 which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast 
 into the oven or the waste-basket. At 
 its best, journalism can nevei', in any of 
 its forms, take the place of literature. 
 It does not, as literature does, lift us out 
 of the trivial interests and petty passions 
 of daily lile into a pure and invigorating 
 air. It does not, as literature does, speak 
 
140 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 a language so noble that while we read 
 we forget our own vulgar and provincial 
 modes of speech. Often, on the con- 
 trary, it echoes our lowest selves in its 
 methods, its manners, and its English. 
 
IV. 
 ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 
 
 English iu the pulpit is subject to 
 the same rules as English out of the pul- 
 pit. English that is good in a church 
 is good in Congress; English that is bad 
 in a speech is bad in a sermon. There 
 is no such thin 2: as " sacred rhetoric." 
 Chairs of "sacred rhetoric" still exist, I 
 believe; but it is difficult to perceive 
 any sense in which the instruction given 
 by the occupant of such a chair is " sa- 
 cred," or any point in which the Eng- 
 lish he instils into his puj^ils differs 
 from that taught by those who observe 
 
142 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 the rules of profane grammar and rhet- 
 oric, — that is, follow the best usage of 
 the best v/riters and sj^ealvers, whether 
 laymen or divines, "I do not think," 
 says Dr. Phillips Brooks (in his excellent 
 lectures before the Divinity School of 
 Yale College), " I do not think there is 
 any such thing as a sermon style proper. 
 He who can write other things well, give 
 him the soul and purpose and knowledge 
 of a preacher, and he will write you a 
 good sermon. But he who cannot write 
 anything well cannot write a sermon 
 well, although we often think he can." 
 
 In applying to sermons the general 
 principles which govern the use of Eng- 
 lish in other species of composition in- 
 tended for delivery, Ave must, of course, 
 take into account the subject-matter of 
 the preacher and the conditions under 
 which he sj^eaks; but we should act in 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 143 
 
 a, similar way if we were dealing witli 
 speeches on the tariff or with lectures 
 on electricity. What difference there is 
 between the English of a successful 
 preacher and that of an equally suc- 
 cessful lecturer, springs, not from a dif- 
 ference in the principles of composition, 
 but from a difference in the application 
 of the same principles. 
 
 Pulpit English has not always been 
 essentially the same with laymen's Eng- 
 lish. Once the minister was really a 
 pastor, a shepherd of the people, by a 
 figure of speech that was close to the 
 fact; for his flock knew no other past- 
 ures than those to w^hich he either led 
 or drove them. To be a minister was 
 to be an authority, from whom there was 
 no appeal. To criticise a sermon as to 
 doctrine, language, or even length, was 
 
14:4: OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 like criticising any other divinely ajD- 
 pointecl dispensation. Generations ago, 
 the bucolic and even the suburban, if 
 not the urban, mind enjoyed listening to 
 'Maard" words, through which no spark of 
 meaning glimmered, and even to Latin"^ 
 or Hebrew quotations ; to logic that led 
 nowhither, or led to a conclusion which 
 
 * 
 
 nobody in the parish doubted ; to the 
 condemnation of sins which nobody in 
 the parish had a mind to, — sins commit- 
 ted in Judea, perhaps, or by the Scarlet 
 Woman of Rome ; to texts of Scripture 
 which had been stitched into so many 
 sermons that they were worn thread- 
 bare; to the droning "first," "secondly," 
 
 * In Evelyn's Diary (1081) we read: "Our new 
 curate preach'd, a pretty hopeful! young man, yet 
 somewhat raw, newly come from college, full of 
 Latine sentences, which in time will weare off." la 
 1G83, Evelyn speaks of " Latine sentences" as "now 
 quite out of fashion in the pulpit." 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 145 
 
 "thirdly," which, by virtue of the iniraer- 
 ical order, were assumed to stand for 
 distinct and logically connected propo- 
 sitions ; and to the " and now, my breth- 
 ren," wdiicli announced the concluding 
 series of exhortations. 
 
 In those far-off days, the people in 
 each parish accepted the sermons which 
 their pastor chose to give them, as they 
 accepted the pastor himself, as they ac- 
 cepted the cold meeting-house in this 
 world and the doctrine of hell -fire in 
 the next. Believins; that their minister 
 broke to them the bread of life, they 
 swallowed sour and heavy sermons as 
 contentedly as they did sweet and light 
 ones. "Dulness," as Pope tells us, was 
 "sacred in a sound divine." Great 
 preachers flourished in those times as in 
 all times before or since ; but it was pos- 
 sible for ignorance to wear a gown for 
 10 
 
146 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 a lifetime without being found out, so 
 great was the deference paid to the cloth 
 by the laity, — especially where, as in 
 New England, the social standing of the 
 clergy was high. 
 
 To-day the preacher must stand or fall 
 on his own merits. His congregation 
 look up to him, if they do look up to 
 him, not as a clergyman, but as a man. 
 They value his sermons, if they do value 
 them, not as sermons, but as being, or as 
 seeming to the listeners to be, good ser- 
 mons. Their feeling towards him is not 
 ill-expressed by Mrs. Brown, a member 
 of Mrs. Oliphant's Salem Chapel, when 
 she says, "We pays 'em their salary, 
 and w^e 'as a right to a civil word : but 
 a minister's a minister, and I'll show 
 him respect as long as he deserves it." 
 In the pulpit, as out of it, the minister 
 now receives just as much respect as he 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 147 
 
 deserves, aud no more. Soouer or later, lie 
 is sure to find his honest level. To induce 
 those who are not habitual church-i>:oers 
 to go to hear him, he must acquire the 
 reputation of having something valuable 
 to say; to make the inattentive atten- 
 tive, he must say something worth hear- 
 ing, and must say it after such a fashion 
 that it will be listened to. 
 
 If a discourse, though ideally excellent 
 as a piece of composition, produces no 
 effect on those to whom it is addressed, 
 it is a failure. A sermon equally well 
 adapted to a hundred different congre- 
 gations — were such a thing conceivable 
 — would be a sermon for nobody. No 
 sermon can be absolutely good. No ser- 
 mon can be equally eiEcacious with an 
 American con^rres^ation and with an 
 English one, in the city and in the coun- 
 try, in the " first church " and in the 
 
14:8 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 "second church" of the same city, or 
 even in the same church on two Sundays 
 five years apart. A preacher with a 
 sensitive nervous organization soon dis- 
 covers that a discourse which produced 
 a great effect upon one body of men is 
 powerless with another ; and that, if he 
 studies the spiritual good of his parish- 
 ioners, he must beware of turning the 
 barrel over too often. "Nothing that 
 is anonymous," says Cardinal Newman, 
 " will preach ; nothing that is dead and 
 gone; nothing even which is of yester- 
 day, however religious in itself and use- 
 ful." 
 
 In order to impress his hearers, a 
 preacher must hold their minds to the 
 substance of what he is saying. A 
 preacher who pleases by figures of 
 speech, sketches of travel, subtleties of 
 reasoning, happy turns of expression, 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 149 
 
 graceful gestures, or melodious voice, 
 may " draw full houses," — to use a phrase 
 often transferred from the sta2:e to certain 
 pulpits; but he is in no true sense success- 
 ful, unless he fixes the attention of his 
 hearers on the subject-matter of his dis- 
 course. A preacher who is compliment- 
 ed upon this or that brilliant passage in 
 a sermon may with reason apprehend 
 that he has failed in the lesson of the 
 day. " Fine writing,'^ says the late Earl 
 of Shaftesbury, "is the pest of all true 
 theology. People will be brilliant, star- 
 tling, original ; and, in that spirit, they 
 sacrifice everything to a 'pregnant expres- 
 sion.'" "Many a sermon," writes Pres- 
 ident Eobinsou, of Brown University, 
 " from over-elaboration of its rhetoric, is 
 open to the charge brought by John 
 Foster ao:ainst the sermons of the dis- 
 tinguished Scotch divine. Dr. Blair: 
 
150 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 ^Tbey were chilled through in stand- 
 ing so long to be dressed.' The st^^le 
 which diverts attention from the thought 
 to itself, whether from excess of orna- 
 mentation or from deficiency of suitable 
 attire, is always a vicious style. And it 
 is a vice that in a sermon is inexcusable. 
 When attention has been arrested by 
 the style rather than by the thought, 
 and hearers remember images and tropes 
 and line turns of expression instead of 
 the truth discussed, the sermon is a com- 
 parative failure. The best style is like 
 plate-glass, so transparent that, in look- 
 ing at the objects beyond it, you foi'get 
 the medium through which you see 
 them. Alas ! that so much pulpit rhet- 
 oric distorts and discolors and half con- 
 ceals, if it does not hide, the very truth 
 it professes to be making clear." 
 
 To inspire interest in the substance 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 151 
 
 of a discourse is mncli ; but it is not all 
 that is needed to produce a profound 
 impression. We listen, as in a pleasant 
 dream, to the silver voice and the sweet 
 sentiments of certain preachers, — preach- 
 ers, too, who have something to say ; 
 but when they have finished we start 
 up as from a dream, rub our eyes, and 
 return to the wide-awake world, taking 
 v/ith us no more of the sermon than of 
 other dreams. We admire the skill and 
 speed with which a preacher of a very 
 different class puts together an apparent- 
 ly logical structure; but the cloud-castle 
 vanishes the moment we leave him. 
 
 The tests of English in the pulpit, 
 then, are to be sought in the pews. It 
 follows, — since the people who go to 
 church are, in our days, very much the 
 same in the pews and out of them, — it 
 follows that a preacher cannot hope to 
 
152 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 interest and impress Ins bearers unless 
 he uses language which they readily un- 
 derstand, language ^vith which they are 
 familiar in the best books they read and 
 the best speakei's they hear. 
 
 A generation ago there were clergy- 
 men — in England at least — whose gram- 
 mar was not above reproach : but the 
 English of the leading New York preach- 
 ers of to-day is, as the correspondent of 
 a Boston secular journal affirms, ^'uni- 
 formly correct;" and we may safely as- 
 sume that what is true in New York is 
 true in every other part of the country. 
 If, however, there be by chance a stray 
 minister anywhere in the United States 
 who breaks the elementary rules of syn- 
 tax, there is nothing to be said to him 
 as a minister, except what may be said to 
 a layman who has uot mastered the 
 A B C of his native tonofue. 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 153 
 
 More than a century and a lialf ago, 
 the pulpit seriously suffered from an evil 
 whicli was pointed out by Dean Swift. 
 In "A Letter to a Young Clergyman," 
 Swift condemns " the frequent use of 
 obscure terms, whicli by the women are 
 called hard words, and, by the bet- 
 ter sort of vulo^ar, fine lano:uao:e ; than 
 which," says he, "I do not know a 
 more universal, inexcusable, and unnec- 
 essary mistake among the clergy of all 
 distinctions, but especially the younger 
 practitioners. . . . Among hard words, I 
 number those . . . which are peculiar to 
 divinity as it is a science, because I have 
 observed several clergymen, otherwise 
 little fond of obscure terms, yet in their 
 sermons very liberal of those which they 
 find in ecclesiastical writers, as if it were 
 our duty to understand them — which I 
 am sure it is not." 
 
154 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 Long after Swift's letter was pub- 
 lished, there still existed a pulpit dia- 
 lect, — or rather several dialects in the 
 several churches, differing from one an- 
 other in some respects, but agreeing in 
 their unlikeness to common speech. 
 Some of the expressions found in these 
 dialects have, as everybody knows, 
 passed out of pulpit use with the 
 controversies of which they were the 
 battle-cries: others may still be heard 
 in discourses by preachers of the old 
 school, who beo;in invocations and ex- 
 hortations with the long-drawn Oh of the 
 revivalist. Such preachers use, in prayer 
 and in sermon, pet expressions that 
 sound to some ears like cant; as, " un- 
 covenanted mercies," " beatific vision," 
 "unsearchable dispensations," "sin-pol- 
 luted lips," " unspeakable and everlast- 
 ing felicity reserved for the saints." They 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 155 
 
 are addicted to phrases like "May we 
 have a realizinsr sense of our shortcom- 
 ings ;" " May we remember our transgres- 
 sions in the hour and article of death ;" 
 "May we, while still in this land of 
 probation, be tremblingly alive to Thy 
 gr-a-cef "Grant us to grow more and 
 more unto the image of Gord^^ — a pro- 
 nunciation which they apparently re- 
 o-ard as more reverential than the usual 
 
 o 
 
 one. " O Lord," says the (unwritten) 
 Methodist liturgy, as taken down by one 
 who has heard it often, " we thank Thee 
 that, while during the past week thou- 
 sands as good as we by nature, and far 
 better by practice, have been called upon 
 to try the realities of an unknown world, 
 we are still on praying ground and in- 
 terceding terms, the spared monuments 
 of Thy mercy." 
 
 Some preachers who avoid ecclesiasti- 
 
156 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 cal formulas fall iuto philosophical ones; 
 as, " will-power," " subjective and objec- 
 tive," the " categories of the Infinite." 
 Others indulge in sentimental phrases; 
 as, *' greenness and beauty," "sweetness 
 and light," "love-service," "soul-building." 
 Others are attached to certain obsolete 
 or obsolescent words, most of w^hich 
 are to be found in the Bible ; as, verily^ 
 nay, 'peradventure^ liat\ spake, tliereof 
 and loliereof, ivherewWi and ivhereivithal, 
 albeit, holden, tarry, marvel, liiishandmaii, 
 lintel, portals, temples (for churches), liah- 
 itations or tabernacles (for houses), gar- 
 ments or raiment (for clothes). Others 
 are fond of euphemistic or euphuistic 
 paraphrases and circumlocutions ; sound- 
 ing sentences ^vith a good many O's 
 in them, and a good many mores and 
 onosts ; as, more full, more true, more 
 clea^r (for fuller, truer, and clearer), mo^t 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 157 
 
 good (for very good); tones that are 
 neither speech nor song, but a hybrid 
 ahnost unknown amono; adults out of 
 the clerical profession ; and styles of 
 pronunciation and enunciation peculiar 
 to the clergy. In one form or anothei', 
 pulpit English is still to be heard even 
 from those who are hostile to it in the- 
 ory, — as the poetic diction which Words- 
 worth was so hot against crept into 
 ^' The Excursion." 
 
 Within a few years, a reaction against 
 ecclesiastical phrases has set in, — a re- 
 action so strong that, like the reaction 
 against the poetic diction of the eigh- 
 teenth century, it has led to the adoption 
 of a style of writing and speaking very 
 different from that of the past, but not 
 less objectionable. In sermons of this 
 class, the idols of the church are roughly 
 handled ; but the very men who assail 
 
158 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 the graven images of the pulpit fall 
 down before the idols of Wall Street, of 
 Fifth Avenue, of the caucus, of a liter- 
 ary coterie, and even — worst of all — of 
 what is known as American humor. 
 
 It may be doubted whether it is not 
 better to venerate forms and symbols 
 than to venerate nothing; to talk an 
 ecclesiastical patois^ rather than to bor- 
 row slano; and vuli>:arisms from the 
 streets; to use phrases which, though 
 now out of date, were once charged with 
 a sacred meaning, rather than those 
 which embody a whim of the moment, 
 and will pass away with the occasion 
 that spawned them ; to preach like a 
 good though old-fashioned book, rather 
 than to brawl like a loud-voiced stump- 
 orator. If the church is to be turned 
 into a theatre, it would surely be better 
 to revive the Miracle Plays of the Mid- 
 
ENGLISH m THE PULPIT. 159 
 
 die Ao'es tbau to Lrinix out roaring: 
 farces on the boards of the pulpit. 
 Phraseology like that of the Rev. Mr. 
 Lyon iu " Felix Holt," or even like that 
 of the Rev. Habakkuk Mucklewrath in 
 " Old Mortality," is as worthy of imita- 
 tion as lanQ:ua2:e like the following' : — 
 
 Certain transactions committed by the illustrious 
 Adam. 
 
 I lament that Christ's people are carried away by 
 the slosh of the learned gentleman's dissertations. 
 
 Man-worship and ecclesiastical bossism ; the logic 
 of the situation ; a swift mental emetic ; a blank 
 draft drawn by the prophet ; God forgive us for 
 dawdling with daybreak ; you hate the devil, and yet 
 you play the devil. 
 
 Sing Sing and New York Tombs, and Shoreditch, 
 London, and Cow Gate, Edinburgh, are only vast 
 carbuncles on the face and back of natural evolu- 
 tion. 
 
 " It cannot be possible," say some of these pul- 
 pit evolutionists, whose brains have been addled by 
 too long brooding of Herbert Spencer and Darwin, 
 — " it cannot be possible that you believe there was 
 a Garden of Eden ?" 
 
160 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 "Yes, just as ii\iicli as I believe that there were 
 roses in my garden last season." 
 
 " Yon don't believe that the whale swallowed 
 Jonah?" 
 
 "Yes: if I were strono- enonQ:h to make a whale, 
 I could arrange safe ingress for any false prophet, 
 leaving it to evolution to eject him." 
 
 "Do you believe that Samson slew one thou- 
 sand men with the jawbone of an ass?" 
 
 " Yes ; and he who assails the Bible wields the 
 same weapon." 
 
 " Do you believe that the water was turned into 
 wine?" 
 
 "Yes; and that the wine now is turned into 
 water with logwood and strychnine. There is noth- 
 iniy in the Bible stao-o-crs me." 
 
 These sentences come from a compar- 
 atively small number of discourses, but 
 most of them were uttered by preachers 
 who '' draw well," and whose words are 
 reported by the newspapers from one 
 end of the country to the other. These 
 are extreme cases, no doubt ; but it is 
 by extreme cases that a tendency may 
 be fairly judged. 
 
ENGLISH IN THE l^ULPIT. IGl 
 
 Both the ecclesiastical-sentimental and 
 the sensational extreme are avoided by 
 the best modern preachers. Shunning 
 theological and philosophical pedantry 
 in every form, and vulgarity of every 
 species, they draw their language from 
 the well of English undefiled. Their ser- 
 mons contain no words that the hear- 
 ers cannot readily understand, and none 
 that shock the sensibilities or offend the 
 taste. Their manner in the pulpit is 
 simple, straightforward, free from affecta- 
 tion either solemn or petty. Conscious- 
 ly or unconsciously, they act on a maxim 
 of that admirable writer, the late Walter 
 Bagehot, — the maxim that " the knack 
 in style is to write [and to speak] like 
 a human being." . . . They " are willing 
 to be themselves, to write their own 
 thoughts in their own words, in the 
 simplest words, in the words wherein 
 11 
 
162 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 tbey were tbougbt." They utter their 
 words, I may add, in their own manner, 
 in the manner in which they would nat- 
 urally speak to other human beings to 
 whom they had something to say. By 
 so writing and so speaking, a preacher 
 may reduce to a minimum the many 
 obstructions to the free and efficient 
 communication of thousrht from himself 
 to his hearers, — obstructions springing 
 out of the imperfections of human lan- 
 guage on the one hand, and the torpor 
 of human minds on the other. 
 
 Similar principles apply to questions 
 touchino; the lens^th of a sermon or of 
 its several parts, to the arrangement of 
 topics, and to methods of treatment. In 
 all these matters, the successful preacher 
 (successful in the best sense) knows 
 how to adjust each discourse to his 
 hearers, to awaken their interest in the 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 163 
 
 besrinuiuo' aucl to fix their attention 
 tlirougliout, — to fix it so firmly tliat the 
 impression is stamped upon the mem- 
 ory. 
 
 Such a preacher knows that, if he 
 would hold his own against the j^lat- 
 form, against books, magazines, and 
 newspapers, he must be short and to 
 the point, must in his first sentence 
 strike the key-note of his discourse, and 
 must keep that note ringing in the ear. 
 Amid the volleys of words from lay 
 preachers of every calibre, he must not 
 only have something to say, but he must 
 say that something as briefly and vig- 
 orously as is consistent with perfect 
 clearness and perfect taste, and in as 
 orderly a manner as is consistent wath 
 ease and flexibility of expression. " As 
 a marksman," says Cardinal Newman, 
 " aims at the target and its bull's-eye. 
 
164 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 and at nothing else, so the preacher must 
 have a definite point before him, which 
 he has to hit. So much is contained for 
 his direction in this single maxim, that 
 duly to enter into it and use it is half 
 the battle; and if he mastered nothing 
 else, still if he really mastered as much 
 as this, he would know all that was im- 
 perative for the due discharge of his 
 office." 
 
 I shall not venture to guess how many 
 of last Sunday's sermons will bear Car- 
 dinal Newman's test; how many of the 
 preachers on that day had a definite 
 point before them, never lost sight of it 
 themselves, and never let those whom 
 they addressed lose sight of it ; or how 
 many even so much as know what is 
 meant by a definite point. 
 
 Those who have yet to learn the 
 advantages of definiteness in preaching 
 
ENGLISn IN THE PULPIT. 1G5 
 
 may study with profit the career o.f the 
 famous Dr. Chalmers, as compared with 
 that of the scarcely less famous Edward 
 Irving. Chalmers, says Carlyle, was a 
 man "of little culture, of narrow sphere, 
 all his life ;" Irving was a man of broad 
 culture, and had " infinitely more thoughts 
 than Chalmers:" but Irving's thoughts 
 did not, as Chalmers's did, all tend one 
 way. Chalmers's discourses " were usu- 
 ally the triumphant on-rush of one idea 
 wath its satellites and supporters; but 
 Irving's wanted in definite head and 
 hackhone^ so that on arriving you might 
 see clearly where and how." Irving, 
 in a word, had all but the one thing 
 needful; and Chalmers had that one 
 thing in full measure. These famous 
 preachers diftered as widely in the qual- 
 ity of their success as in character 
 and mental equipment. Irving blazed 
 
166 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 like a meteor iu the London sky for a 
 while, but at last went out in darkness 
 and delusion ; Chalmers illuminated the 
 Church of Scotland through all the years 
 of his ministry with a fixed and steady 
 light. Irving was a striking phenome- 
 non ; Chalmers was, and still is, a pow- 
 erful influence for good. 
 
 Not a few modern sermons cannot 
 be concentrated into a definite proposi- 
 tion, — some because they contain noth- 
 ing but spectral generalities, such as 
 haunt men who have no real thing to 
 say; some because, though a number of 
 propositions are hinted at, no one of 
 them is developed or pressed home. 
 Some sermons are born of a metaphor, 
 have no existence outside of that meta- 
 phor, and at last ^' leave their little lives 
 in air." Others have their being in a 
 refrain, caught from the text, and owing 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 167 
 
 such impressiveness as it lias to persist- 
 ent repetition, which soon becomes "like 
 a tale of little meaning, though the words 
 are strong." Some are "pulpit -efforts," 
 in which the struggle to produce "a great 
 sermon" keeps the preacher from saying 
 anything, small or great, that is worth 
 listening to. Some have a literary air, 
 as if pains had been taken with the sen- 
 tences as collocations of words rather 
 than as embodiments of thought. There 
 are ministers who preach moral essays 
 about virtue, — essays excellent in doc- 
 trine and intention, but vague and aim- 
 less : the gun is good, but it is as likely 
 to hit one tiling as another. 
 
 Sermons that lack definiteness, either 
 because they leave out the essential or 
 because they put in the unessential, do 
 good sometimes, of course. The seed 
 they scatter may take root somewhere; 
 
168 OUR ENGLI8II. 
 
 but often the ^'good things," as the 
 phrase goes, which are remembered, are 
 not those which a conscientious preach- 
 er would choose to be remembered by. 
 Such a preacher, for example, would 
 hardly be edified by compliments to a 
 striking simile in his morning's dis- 
 course, to his graphic pictures of Orien- 
 tal life, to his picturesque account of the 
 dissipations of Corinth, or even to the 
 ingenuity of his reasoning against this 
 or that heresy. 
 
 To preach like a human being address- 
 ing other human beings for a definite 
 purpose is much, but it is not all. The 
 sermon may still be dull, cold, inejffec- 
 tive, — may convince the understanding 
 without warming the heart, moving the 
 will, or affecting in any practical way 
 desires, purposes, or acts. "I am sure," 
 writes Dr. Phillips Brooks, "that many 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 169 
 
 men, who, if tbey came to preach once 
 in a n:reat while in the midst of other 
 occupations, would preach with reality 
 and fire, are deadened to their sacred 
 work by their constant intercourse with 
 sacred thin^-s. Their constant dealing: 
 with the truth makes them less power- 
 ful to bear the truth to others, as a pipe 
 through which the water always flows 
 collects its sediment, and is less fit to 
 let more water throu£:h." " Generali- 
 ties in thought," writes Professor Austin 
 Phelps (in '^ The Theory of Preaching"), 
 ""naturally take on hackneyed forms in 
 style. These flow in monotonous suc- 
 cession, like the flill of a mill-stream. 
 Weigh them down with a sympathetic 
 delivery, and you will have the clerical 
 humdrum in comical perfection. Hence 
 have arisen dull, ponderous, indolent, 
 corpulent bodies of divinity in sermons. 
 
170 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 which remiQcl one of a child's first at- 
 tempts at composition on duty, friend- 
 ship, truth, education, industry, time, 
 eternity." 
 
 Such " performances " may be termed 
 sermons, if by a sermon is meant a dis- 
 course in a church on some moral or re- 
 ligious topic, with a text as its head- 
 piece; but they lack that which is the 
 essence of a good sermon, as of every 
 other form of discourse that aims at any- 
 thing beyond mere information. They 
 lack life. '^ Be alive," Carlyle writes to 
 his brother John ; " as my Shrewsbury"" 
 coachman told a Methodist parson ; ' be 
 alive;' all is included in that." 
 
 In listening to sermons from preach- 
 ers of various Protestant denominations, 
 and in examining such sermons as have 
 fallen in my way, I have found abun- 
 dant evidence tending to support the 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 171 
 
 views I have expressed. Of two ser- 
 mons equally valuable in point of sub- 
 stance, that proves to be tlie better 
 which deals with one definite subject 
 and only one, deals with it methodical- 
 ly, and in language like that used by lay 
 writers and speakers of the best class, 
 and dwells upon the central idea of it 
 long enough and strongly enough and 
 warmly enough to make it felt as well 
 as understood. The parts of the less 
 admirable as well as of the more ad- 
 mirable discourses which stand out from 
 the rest in memory are the simplest ones, 
 the most pointed, the most concrete, 
 those most like the familiar talk of one 
 human being with another human being, 
 whom he earnestly desires to influence. 
 
 The sermons, on the other hand, to 
 wdiich it was most difficult to hold 
 the attention, were those that roamed 
 
172 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 over a wide field, with no clearly de- 
 fined purpose or destination in view ; 
 or those that circled round the text, 
 like a moth about a candle, which it 
 could not keep away from but which 
 did it more harm than good ; or those 
 that sluggishly brought into view the 
 small commonplaces that lie within a 
 large one, — like a nest of empty boxes. 
 The longest sermons were the worst 
 ones, not only because they were long, 
 — and " length is a fatal enemy to the 
 sublime," — but also because their length 
 was largely owing to the preacher's ap- 
 parent inability to exclude matters that 
 belonged in some other sermon, to avoid 
 redundancies and needless repetitions,* to 
 
 * " It will surprise any one who has not made 
 the experiment," writes President Robinson, " to 
 find how difhcult it is to select, out of any two 
 hundred of a man's best written sermons, twenty- 
 five in which there are no repeated tlionghtt 
 
 .s." 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 173 
 
 leave out iDtroductions that introduced 
 notliing or introduced too much, conclu- 
 sions that were no conclusions, since there 
 had been no argument, or digressions 
 which never came back to the starting- 
 point. 
 
 How, it remains to ask, shall a preach- 
 er provide himself with the means of 
 communicatinGi: the truth to his hearers 
 in such a manner as to interest and im- 
 press them ? 
 
 If it be true that style and man are 
 one, sermon and preacher must be one. 
 Whatever builds up the preacher's be- 
 ing, whatever broadens and deepens, il- 
 luminates and inspires his personality, 
 will tell upon his sermons, and will tell 
 for much if he resolves that it shall. It 
 behooves him to make himself a man, 
 and then to see to it that his man- 
 
174: OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 hood strengthens and shines through 
 his written and his spoken work, and 
 that he is felt as a personal force behind 
 his sermons, as Jonathan Edwards and 
 Whitefield, — for we cannot place our 
 ideals too high, — Chalmers and Kobert 
 Hall, Channing and Frederick Robert- 
 son, were felt in the pulpit ; and as 
 John Adams and Webster, Emerson and 
 Carlyle, were felt out of the pulpit. No 
 course of life that emasculates a man can 
 be good for him, or for those who look 
 to him for moral and spiritual guidance. 
 If a theological school tends to impair 
 mental virility, the student should leave 
 it. If pastoral visits, intercourse with 
 brother ministers, or the habits of a re- 
 cluse, have this tendency, they should be 
 given up. If a minister sees so much of 
 the sick and the sorrowing that his own 
 bodily or spiritual health is impaired, he 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 175 
 
 bIiouIcI take a course of joy. Whatever 
 his special circumstances, he should give 
 himself invigorating discipline, like that 
 which comes unsought to lawyers, doc- 
 tors, and men of business, — discij^line 
 which a man gets while measuring him- 
 self directly with his fellows in the 
 stru2:s:le for a livelihood. 
 
 It is nobody's interest to expose a 
 preacher's sophistry or to puncture his 
 rhetoric. He may go on committing the 
 same faults — whether in argument or in 
 grammar — Sunday after Sunday, and in- 
 cense will still rise from sewing-circles 
 and vestry tea-parties. If criticisms are 
 made, he is the last person to hear 
 them ; for the hard-headed deacon who 
 roughly tells the truth about a sermon 
 which he has just heard, exists chiefly in 
 novels. In a theological seminary, as in 
 coHege, a student may breathe an air 
 
176 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 charfred with as much criticism as is 
 good for him ; but when he enters the 
 ministry, the chances are that he will re- 
 ceive no serious criticism unless and un- 
 til he is so fortunate as to marry a 
 woman wdio has the sense to see his 
 weaknesses and the courage to point 
 them out to him. "I have heard," said 
 Emerson, in his address on "The Ameri- 
 can Scholar," " I have heard it said that 
 the clergy — who are always more uni- 
 versally than any other class the schol- 
 ars of their day — are addressed as wom- 
 en ; that the rough, spontaneous conver- 
 sation of men they do not hear, but only 
 a mincing and diluted speech." 
 
 Mr. Galton, in his work on "Hereditary 
 Genius," summing up the result of his 
 reading in clerical biographies, declares 
 that "A gently complaining and fatigued 
 spirit is that in which Evangelical Di- 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 177 
 
 vines are very apt to pass their days." 
 " Tiiese words," adds Dr. Brooks, " tell 
 perfectly a story that we all know who 
 have been intimate with many ministers. 
 That which ought to be the manliest of 
 all professions has a tendency, practically, 
 to make men unmanly." Hence, minis- 
 ters are, or have been until very recently, 
 placed by the community in a class by 
 themselves, as if they were different from 
 other men. They have been treated like 
 persons exceptionally weak, in whose fa- 
 vor discriminations had to be made. It 
 has been taken for granted that they 
 were not above accepting help of any 
 kind from any quarter; and magazines, 
 newspapers, even clothes, have been of- 
 fered to them at reduced prices. 
 
 These badges of inferiority were al- 
 ways offensive to the stronger men of 
 the profession, and have been shaken off 
 
 
178 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 by tbem. To shake them off altogethei*, 
 it is only necessary that the clergy as a 
 body should will to do so. If a minister 
 finds that his salary is so small that he 
 cannot make both ends meet, without 
 either starving, or becoming dependent 
 ujDon public or private charity, let him 
 call a parish meeting, and frankly preach 
 to his people from the text, " The labor- 
 er is worthy of his hire." If that ex2:)edi- 
 ent fails, he may seek some other field 
 of usefulness. He should steadfastly re- 
 sist the tendency of a calling that has so 
 much to do with books and with invalids, 
 — the tendency to dwarf and impoverish 
 character. He should constantly bear in 
 mind that he whose o\vn speech is strong 
 and direct is not addressed in "mincing 
 and diluted s]3eech" by others, that vigor 
 in the pulpit is respected by vigor out 
 of it. He should know and feel that 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 179 
 
 vi£>:or in a sermon comes from vio:or in 
 the preacher, clearness of statement and 
 cogency of reasoning in a sermon from 
 the clear and well-trained mind of the 
 preacher, and the power of a sermon to 
 move hearts and determine action from 
 sincerity of belief and intensity of feel- 
 ing. He only who keeps the springs of 
 his own life full can hope to freshen and 
 fertilize the lives of others. 
 
 The preacher who means that the 
 s]3rings of his life shall be full will not 
 confine his reading; to sermons and re- '^"^ 
 ligious journals, or even to theological 
 treatises and to moral and ethical philos- 
 ophy. He will keep up, not only his 
 Greek and his Hebrew, but his knowl- 
 edge of every kind. He wnll follow the 
 course of the natural sciences, so far, at 
 least, as they deal with fundamental 
 principles and general results. He will 
 
 \ 
 
 I 
 
180 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 find food for his mind in lieatlien as 
 well as in Christian philosophers, and 
 in books written by unbelievers as well 
 as in those written by believers. He 
 will draw inspiration from great poets, 
 and knowledge of human nature from 
 great novelists. No book that he reads 
 but will have a message for him, and 
 throuofh him for his hearers. 
 
 Ministers whose culture is broad as 
 well as deep are to be found in all 
 denominations; but one would hardly 
 venture to affirm that they form either 
 the exceptions or the rule in any de- 
 nomination. It is to be hoped, however, 
 that the total number of ministers of 
 culture is larger now than it was in 1827, 
 when Dr. Samuel Miller, Professor of 
 Ecclesiastical History in the Theological 
 Seminary at Princeton, published his 
 "Letters on Clerical Manners and Hab- 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 181 
 
 its." "It is," Avrites Dr. Miller, "as 
 wonderful as it is liumiliatino; how en- 
 tirely habits of study are abandoned by 
 many clerical men, almost as soon as 
 what may be called their initiatory 
 course is closed. From that time, they 
 seem to think it sufficient if they read 
 and think enou2:h each week to address 
 their people twice from the j)ulpit on the 
 Sabbath, in a commonplace way. Thence- 
 forward, they make no solid addition to 
 their stock of knowledo^e. Their minds 
 become lean and inactive. Instead of 
 causing ' their profiting to appear unto 
 all' every time they enter the sacred desk, 
 they become more and more jejune and 
 uninteresting. With the habit, they lose 
 all taste for study. Their leisure hours 
 are spent in worldly cares or in gossiping 
 rather than among their books. They 
 invite premature intellectual torpor and 
 
182 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 debility. They cease to instruct their 
 hearers, and soon become a dead-weight, 
 instead of a comfort and blessing to their 
 congregations. Such is the history of 
 many a minister who had good natural 
 talents, and concerning wdiom the exjDec- 
 tations of his friends were raised, but 
 who could never be persuaded to love 
 study." 
 
 The love of study is, laowever, not 
 enough to keep a preacher's mind from 
 becomino; "lean and inactive." A man 
 whose function it is to tell other men 
 how to live will, if he is wise, bring him- 
 self within the influence of currents of 
 life that do not reach the surface in 
 books. He will know what the people 
 of his parish are doing and thinking, 
 what temptations are most dangerous to 
 them, what trials most severe. He will 
 watch the course of public events every- 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 183 
 
 where. He will occasionally go to a 
 great city, in order to receive an impulse 
 from the tides of human activity that 
 i^our through unfamiliar streets. He 
 will meet men and women of all grades 
 of intelligence, and will meet them on 
 equal terms. 
 
 If at any time secular newspapers and 
 reviews busy themselves with a religious 
 topic, — such as the nature of evil, the 
 inspiration of the Scriptures, the origin 
 of man, or his future after death, — the 
 wise preacher will not keep silent until 
 popular interest in the topic has died 
 out. If public attention is fixed upon 
 some flagrant instance of corruption in 
 office, dishonesty in business, or moral 
 cowardice in public life, he will not put 
 off preaching about political corruption, 
 business dishonesty, or moral cowardice, 
 until the topic has again become an 
 
184 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 abstract one, but will seize the occasion 
 to press the lesson of the day U23on his 
 hearers. He will look at current ques- 
 tions with calm eyes, will lift them upon 
 the high ground of principle, and will add 
 something important to what everybody 
 is saying. 
 
 Not content with the study of books 
 and of men, a preacher who means to 
 make himself thoroughly useful to his 
 people will — by farming or gardening, 
 by practising some handicraft, or study- 
 ing some science experimentally — cul- 
 tivate an acquaintance with practical 
 things; and he will seek in nature and 
 in art ins]3irations and sympathies that 
 neither books nor men supply. 
 
 All this he will do for general cult- 
 ure; but every part of his experience 
 will contribute to the excellence of his 
 sermons, and none the less surely be- 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 185 
 
 cause it does so indirectly. What Bry- 
 deu says of the translator applies with 
 redoubled force to the sermon - writei*. 
 "There are many," writes this great au- 
 thor, — and the excellence of his own 
 prose bears testimony to the value of 
 his counsel, — " there are many who un- 
 derstand Greek and Latin, and yet are 
 iornorant of their mother- toni^ue. The 
 proprieties and delicacies of the English 
 are known to few ; it is impossible even 
 for a good wit to understand and prac- 
 tise them, without the help of a liberal 
 education, long reading, and digesting of 
 those few o:ood authors we have anion o^st 
 us, the knowledge of men and manners, 
 the freedom of habitudes and conversa- 
 tion with the best company of both sex- 
 es; and, in short, without wearing off the 
 rust which he contracted while he was 
 laying in a stock of learning." 
 
186 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 There are preachers, I fear, whose ser- 
 mons have no very close connection with 
 their lives or their thoughts. A minis- 
 ter of this class makes no preparation 
 with the pen or with the mind imtil the 
 day before the sermon is to be delivered. 
 At last he chooses a text. The next 
 step is to read what the commentators 
 have to say on the text; the next, to 
 find in the volumes of sermons that 
 crowd his shelves what other preachers 
 have said about it. Havino; thus ac- 
 cumulated a mass of material, such as it 
 is, he proceeds to write, — for he has no 
 time to think for himself, or even to ar- 
 rano-e in his mind the thouQ-hts he has 
 collected from others. Writing he en- 
 joys, for, like Mr. Sherlock in "Felix 
 Holt," he is " not insensible to the pleas- 
 ure of turning sentences successfully." 
 Like Mr. Sherlock, he can '' take coffee 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 187 
 
 [or tea] and sifc up late, and perhaps 
 produce something rather fine." 
 
 Very difl:erent from these manufact- 
 ured articles is the sermon that leaves 
 a mark upon the lives of those that hear 
 it. Such a sermon is not a manufacture, 
 but a growth rooted in character and 
 developed by culture. It may have been 
 written early or late, slowly or rapidly, 
 or it may not have been written at all ; 
 but, whatever the method of compo- 
 sition, the sermon is the result of the 
 oriofinal action of a mind that is work- 
 inc: with all its enero;ies towards a defi- 
 nite object. In such a sermon, this or 
 that w^ord will be taken, — not because it 
 is either a fine or a coarse word, a plain 
 or a "hard" one, not because it has served 
 in many sermons already, nor yet be- 
 cause it was never in good company be- 
 fore, — but because it is the one word that 
 
188 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 conveys the tlionglit clearly and impres- 
 sively to those for whom it is intended. 
 If a great preacher uses a metaphor, he 
 does so, not in order to adorn his dis- 
 course, but because the figure presents 
 his thought clearly and vividly. We 
 may say of him what Cardinal Newman 
 says of the great author. " If he is brief, 
 it is because few words suffice ; when he 
 is lavish of them, still each word has its 
 mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vig- 
 orous march of his elocution. . . . He is 
 one who has something to say and 
 knows how to say it. . . . He is master 
 of the twofold Loo^os, the thouo:ht and 
 the word, distinct, but inseparable from 
 each other. He may, if so be, elaborate 
 his compositions, or he may pour out his 
 improvisations, but in either case he has 
 but one aim, which he keeps steadily be- 
 fore him, and is conscientious and single- 
 
ENGLISH IN THE PULPIT. 189 
 
 mindecl in fulfilling;. That aim is to 
 irive forth what he has within him ; and 
 from his very earnestness it comes to 
 pass that, w^hatever be the splendor of 
 his diction or the harmony of his peri- 
 ods, he has with him the charm of an 
 incommunicable simplicity. Whatever 
 be his subject, high or low, he treats it 
 suitably and for its own sake." 
 
V. 
 COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 
 
 Pessimists clecLare — and not altogether 
 without reason — that the art of conver- 
 sation is among the lost arts. They 
 lament that we have no good talkers, 
 like Addison, Johnson, or Coleridge, and 
 no salons^ such as gave France social pre- 
 eminence in the last century. With all 
 our talk about women's rights and wom- 
 en's education, what, they ask, have we 
 in place of Margaret Fuller's classes in 
 social science ? With all our speeches 
 and speech-makers, where, in the younger 
 generation, shall we find the easy, grace- 
 ful, colloquial touch which Emerson and 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 191 
 
 Wendell Phillips had, which Dr. Holmes 
 and Mr. Lowell have ? We " descend to 
 meet," as Emerson complains; and we 
 meet, not to exchange thoughts, fancies, 
 witticisms, but to dance, eat, drink, to 
 discuss the weather, the fashions, the 
 latest engagement, or to listen to set 
 speeches on stated topics. Many a man 
 is too tired, many a woman too anxious, 
 almost every one too self-conscious, for 
 genuine social intercourse. In the family 
 circle, it is the grown people who are seen 
 but not heard. The talk of the young is 
 either learned and would-be profound, 
 or puerile and full of slang, or all noise 
 and giggle. The best of it is carried on 
 by the eyes. 
 
 To remedy the deplorable state of the 
 social world which pessimists picture in 
 these exasrcrerated terms, it has been seri- 
 ously proposed to have our colleges teach 
 
192 OUR ENGLISH 
 
 tbe art of conversation, as some of them 
 now teacb, or attempt to teacb, journal- 
 ism and the art of oral discussion. The 
 experiment might be worth making, and 
 it would, no doubt, in projier hands, be 
 to a certain extent successful. An intel- 
 ligent teacher might, at least, collect raw 
 material for conversation from readinir, 
 observation, and reflection upon what had 
 been read or observed, might enlarge and 
 purify his j)upils' vocabulary, and might 
 give them facility, if not felicity, of ex- 
 pression. 
 
 Such instruction would naturally bear 
 most fruit in an institution in which both 
 sexes were represented : but even there 
 the social faculty would be develo2Ded 
 outside of the class-room rather than in 
 it; at times when students were drawn 
 to one another by natural affinity rath- 
 er than when they were brought to- 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 193 
 
 getber by the college authorities ; at 
 times when they chose their own top- 
 ics rather than when they talked on 
 prescribed ones. The effort to make con- 
 versation a literary exercise would inev- 
 itably impair the freedom which is the 
 charm of social intercourse: for the in- 
 stant a talker begins to pay close at- 
 tention to correctness of lang-uaofe and 
 harmony of periods, he is in danger of 
 becoming dull; the instant he aims at 
 the literary development of an idea or 
 the logical maintenance of a proposition, 
 he is in danger of becoming bookish or 
 disputatious, or both. It is when he is 
 so deeply interested in his subject or in 
 his company as to forget himself, it is in 
 moments when a strong: feeling^ is dom- 
 inant, that he is at his best; but such 
 moments would be rare in a class-room 
 oro;anized for instruction in conversation. 
 13 
 
194: OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 If question and answer, remark and re- 
 joinder, ever fly fast under the eye of 
 a teacher, it must be when he pays 
 more attention to the substance of what 
 is said than to the form of expression. 
 The art of conversation can be taught, 
 if at all, not as a thing by itself, but as 
 an incident to something else; and it 
 can be taught with most advantage to 
 a class small enough to be treated, not 
 as an audience to be lectured to, but as 
 so many individual minds. In oral as 
 in written w^ork, a teacher may do much 
 for his pupils' English, if he does not 
 undertake to do too much. 
 
 Perhaps, however, more may be done 
 in the cultivation of the social faculty 
 before a boy goes to college than after- 
 wards. In this matter, as in others, 
 physical conditions are imjiortant; for, 
 other things being equal, a child who 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 195 
 
 abounds in animal spirits and nervous 
 energy will talk better than his blood- 
 less companions. In family life, too 
 much repression of young peoj^le is as 
 bad as too little. A mean is attainable 
 between the practice of forcing children, 
 as our ancestors did, to sit like deaf- 
 mutes in the presence of their elders, 
 and that of suppressing the parents alto- 
 gether, as is often done nowadays, while 
 the children gabble in language caught 
 from an io-norant nurse. A child's table 
 English should be looked after almost 
 as closely as his table manners, but not 
 so closely as to make him feel that he 
 is nagged. His books should be scruti- 
 nized, not only as sources of mental and 
 moral strength or weakness, but also as 
 influences tendino; to form habits of cor- 
 rect, vigorous, and agreeable expression, 
 or to retard the formation of such hab- 
 
196 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 its. To choose all liis playmates for 
 Lim may not be feasible ; but intimacies 
 may be fostered with children who come 
 from cultivated stock and whose Eng- 
 lish is looked after at home. In the 
 choice of teachers, preference may be 
 s:iven to those whose lauOTasfe is least 
 open to criticism. In-door games wdiich 
 give practice in the use of words, or en- 
 large the vocabulary, may be favored 
 rather than those which consist of little 
 but noise. Children, in a word, may 
 and should be guarded and guided in 
 the matter of English at every point; for 
 at every point, as has often been said, 
 the foes of good English encompass 
 them. 
 
 To young men and women who have 
 . learned to talk pretty well at home, 
 school and college may give a help- 
 ing hand without appearing to do so. 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 197 
 
 They may infuse life into the intercourse 
 between teacher and pupil ; confirm hab- 
 its of simplicity and fluency of speech; 
 encoura2:e clubs in which conversation 
 plays a leading part ; recommend books 
 that add to a reader's stock of words 
 and show him the value of naturalness 
 and individuality in expression ; distin- 
 guish the good parts of a classic from 
 the parts not so good, and the true, notes 
 in a piece of current writing from the 
 false ones ; point out the merits and the 
 defects of a pupil's own work, spoken 
 as well as written ; and keep constantly 
 before his mind the supreme importance 
 of saying what he has to say in pure 
 and idiomatic English. 
 
 After all, however, parents and teach- 
 ers can do comparatively little tow^ards 
 the production of good talkers, — far less, 
 indeed, than they can towards the pro- 
 
198 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 duction of good writers. Young people 
 who have had excellent instruction in 
 writing, and none at all in talking, may, 
 nevertheless, talk better than they write: 
 for, as Pascal says, " II y en a qui parlent 
 bien et qui n'ecriveut pas bieu. C'est 
 que le lieu, I'assistance les echauffent, 
 et tirent de leur esprit plus qu'ils n'y 
 trouvent sans cette chaleur." A man- 
 uscript may be held before the eye as 
 long as is necessary for purposes of criti- 
 cism, and it should be criticised in cold 
 blood : but spoken words are gone with 
 the breath that uttered them; they must 
 be criticised, if at all, while they are on 
 the wing, and to criticise them then is to 
 stop the flight in which their life con- 
 sists. It is only in Kabelais, and in 
 the travels of Mandeville as related by 
 Addison, that words flow as freely after 
 they have been thawed as before they 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 199 
 
 were frozen, — a plienomenon which even 
 the phonograph may never fully repro- 
 duce. 
 
 In talking, even more than in writing, 
 it is practice which makes perfect. A 
 talker may be helped in various ways, 
 but he must form himself by talking. 
 "Conference maketh a ready man," says 
 Bacon ; and readiness, if not the essence 
 of good conversation, is one of its essen- 
 tials. Other thin2:s are no doubt desira- 
 ble. Multifarious, though not necessarily 
 exact or profound knowledge; ability to 
 contribute to the discussion of every topic 
 as it comes up something that seems new, 
 and to do so without pedantry or arro- 
 gance, vulgarity or pertness, without in- 
 sisting or persisting; tact, or the gift of 
 knowing when, to whom, and how to say 
 this or that, when to speak and when to 
 be silent ; the royal gift of language that 
 
200 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 fits time, place, and person ; the royal 
 gift of manner that sends each word di- 
 rectly and gracefully to its address ; — all 
 these, not to speak of purely intellectual 
 or moral qualities, the excellent talker 
 must have : but is not readiness part and 
 parcel of each? that which gives value 
 for conversational purposes to each ? that 
 which transmutes ore into coin that is 
 current everywhere ? To have one's phys- 
 ical, mental, and spiritual possessions ful- 
 ly in hand is more than half the social 
 battle, is it not ? 
 
 To a ready talker clever things occur 
 while he is talking, and not on the stair- 
 case when the conversation is over. His 
 wits are always and altogether at his 
 command; what he knows — fact, argu- 
 ment, anecdote, illustration — is at his 
 tongue's end ; what he feels he feels 
 promptly and can express at once. Out 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 201 
 
 of Lis Lead, at a toiicL from some one of 
 tLe company, comes wLat passes in tLat 
 company for Minerva, fully armed and 
 equipped. He never argues, never wran- 
 gles, never stagnates. He never tells a 
 long story, or misses tLe j^oint of a sLort 
 one. In Lis company, tLe dinner -Lour 
 is a "regeneration of body and mind." 
 He Las mastered tLe art of conversation 
 as defined by Lord Beaconsfield — "to be 
 prompt witLout being stubborn, to re- 
 fute witLout argument, and to clotLe 
 great matters in a motley garb." 
 
 Useful to a talker as all readiness is, 
 wLat Le needs most is readiness witli col- 
 loquial EnglisL. To accumulate a fund 
 of sucL EnglisL, one sLould listen to good 
 talkers, and sLould read books tLat re- 
 produce tLe language of good talkers ; 
 to be sure of Laving tLe fund tLus ac- 
 cumulated ready for use, one must talk 
 
202 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 much, and must talk with many people 
 on many subjects. 
 
 What is colloquial English ? In what 
 respect, if in any, does it differ from the 
 English of the platform and the pulpit, 
 and from that of books? If there is a 
 difference, should it be removed ? Do we 
 praise a man w^hen we say that he talks 
 like a book, or an orator when we say 
 that he speaks as if he were conversing 
 with his hearers, or an author when w^e 
 say that he writes as he talks ? 
 
 Other things being equal, the best 
 spoken, like the best written, English 
 is that which conforms most closely to 
 the language as used by men and wom- 
 en of culture, — a high standard which it 
 is by no means easy to live up to in daily 
 conversation. To keep local or profes- 
 sional peculiarities out of one's speech 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 203 
 
 is more difficult tlian to keej) them out 
 of one's manuscript. It is more diffi- 
 cult, too, to settle questions of accent or 
 of pronunciation than those of sj^elling 
 and punctuation, and that for two rea- 
 sons. In the spoken language, fashions 
 vary more rapidly and more capriciously 
 than in the written one ; and it is not 
 always clear (especially in the United 
 States) to what authority, in a doubtful 
 case, an appeal can be made. For the 
 most part, however, cultivated men and 
 women in English-speaking nations speak 
 substantially alike. It is perhaps impos- 
 sible to get rid of local characteristics 
 altogether; but now and then an Eng- 
 lishman or a Scotchman is mistaken for 
 an American, and sometimes even an 
 Englishman fails to discover a travelling 
 American's nationality. 
 
 There are, no doubt, differences in vo- 
 
204 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 cabulary, iutonation, and accent between 
 the Eno;lisli of almost all well-bred Amer- 
 leans and that of equally well-bred Eng- 
 lishmen, as there are, to a quick ear, 
 between the sjDeech of a man born and 
 brought up in Chicago or Richmond 
 and that of a Philadel23hian or a Bos- 
 tonian ; but, these differences apart, culti- 
 vated men and women of English-speak- 
 ing nations speak, as they write, the same 
 language. 
 
 Some of the differences between collo- 
 quial and other English grow out of the 
 very nature of speech. One of these sug- 
 gests itself at once. The language of 
 conversation should be, and should seem 
 to be, the inspiration of the moment. A 
 talker should abstain from sentences that 
 bear the marks of havino; been framed 
 in advance, and from words that sound 
 as if they had been chosen with care. 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 205 
 
 His mind should seem to be set in mo- 
 tion, not by reading or reflection, but by 
 the impact of another mind uj)on his. 
 Even Sheridan, who thought out his 
 clever things for the day before getting 
 up in the morning, had to lead the con- 
 versation to the spot where his treasures 
 were hidden. In order to do this with- 
 out being detected, he had to keep his 
 wits on the spring; for if those with 
 whom he talked had guessed what he 
 was doing, his charm would have van- 
 ished. As it was, he was accounted a 
 brilliant rather than an agreeable talker; 
 there was a hard, metallic glitter to his 
 talk, as there is to the dialogues in his 
 plays. 
 
 Sheridan's genius made him a social 
 success ; but who really enjoys the so- 
 ciety of "the conversation man" as de- 
 scribed by Lord Beaconsfield ? 
 
206 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 " His talk is a thing apart, got np be 
 fore he enters the company from whose 
 conduct it should grow out. He sits in 
 the middle of a large table, and, with 
 a brazen voice, bawls out his anecdotes 
 about Sir Thomas or Sir Humphry, 
 Lord Blank, or my Lady Blue. He is 
 incessant, yet not interesting; ever vary- 
 ing, yet always monotonous. Even if 
 we are amused, we are no more grateful 
 for the entertainment than we are to the 
 lamp over the table for the light which 
 it universally sheds, and to yield which 
 it was obtained on purpose. We are 
 more gratified by the slight conversa- 
 tion of one who is often silent, but who 
 speaks from his momentary feelings, than 
 ^ by all this hullabaloo." 
 
 Even if a would-be Sheridan suc- 
 ceeds, his trials, as Byron tells us, are 
 in an v. 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 207 
 
 ** I must not quite omit the talking sage, 
 Kit-Cat, the famous conversationist, 
 Who, in his coraraon-place book, had a page 
 Prepared each morn for evenings. ' List, oh 
 
 list r— 
 
 'Alas, poor ghost!' — what unexpected woes 
 Await those who have studied their bons-mots. 
 
 *' Firstly, [sic] they must allure the conversation 
 By many windings to their clever clinch ; 
 
 And secondly, must let slip no occasion, 
 Nor bate (abate) their hearers of an inch, 
 
 But take an ell — and make a great sensation, 
 If possible ; and thirdly, never flinch 
 
 When some smart talker puts them to the test, 
 
 But seize the last word, which no doubt 's the best." 
 
 With ordinary meo, preparation in the 
 matter of language betrays itself, as all 
 of us wLo mix much with the social 
 world must have noticed. A jDerson who 
 makes such preparation is like a hostess 
 who, having asked her guests to take pot- 
 luck with the family, receives them in 
 full-dress. He is, we instinctively feel, 
 takinoj us at a disadvantasfc. We doubt 
 
208 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 the sincerity of opinions which it has 
 been found necessary to formulate in 
 advance, and the originality of sayings 
 which might have been copied from a 
 book. The artificial phrase hides the 
 natural feeling of the speaker; he pur- 
 chases literary excellence by the loss of 
 life as well as of truth. 
 
 Preparation in the matter of language 
 is, then, to be discouraged ; but society 
 would be duller than it is if preparation 
 of no kind were made by those who, 
 like the dead peoj^le in Mr. Crawford's 
 /novel, are " alive for the purposes of con- 
 versation " only. The rich and varied life 
 of a doctor, a lawyer, or a man of busi- 
 ness, supplies him with topics in abun- 
 dance ; but those who lack such re- 
 sources are not to be blamed if, before 
 going out of an evening, they take a 
 hasty swallow of the last new book, or 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 209 
 
 of a review of the last new book, or — if 
 they have not time for that — of the es- 
 sence of the periodicals of the month ex- 
 tracted by a skilful hand and " flavored 
 to suit/' 
 
 In New York and Washington, if I 
 am not misinformed, "seminars" are pe- 
 riodically held, at which a clever wom- 
 an coaches other clever women in the 
 political, literary, and ethical topics of 
 the day. Such ''seminars" cannot but 
 be for the advantage, not only of the 
 women they prepare for social ordeals, 
 but also of the society which these 
 women frequent. Each woman will add 
 something of her own to the knowl- 
 edge with which she has been crammed, 
 will at least put facts and ideas into 
 her own words, make them her own in 
 some way. This may be done so well 
 that one who is not in the secret is not 
 U 
 
210 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 likely to guess that each of several 
 women with whom lie has been talkino^ 
 drew the material of what she said from 
 a common stock provided at the after- 
 noon conference. 
 
 If the male moth of society should 
 have his " seminar " too, and should get 
 as much help from it as women do, what 
 a start would be given to conversation, 
 — as regards, at least, the variety and 
 the range of topics discussed ! Awk- 
 ward masculine minds would, however, 
 absorb less from the conductor of a 
 *^seminar," would contribute less of their 
 own than women do, and would trust 
 less to the inspiration of the moment 
 for their language. The facts and opin- 
 ions they had listened to might be re- 
 produced in a stereotyped form, and thus 
 they might lose more in spontaneity 
 than they gained in information. A dull 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 211 
 
 man mio-ht, like Mr. Georo-e Meredith's 
 Arthur Rhodes, fire "a gun too big for 
 hiiu, of premeditated charging." To such 
 a discharge, his hostess, like Mr. Mere- 
 dith's Lady Wathin, might naturally 
 prefer " the old legal anecdotes, sure of 
 their laugh, and the citations from the 
 manufactories of fun in tlie press, which 
 were current and instantly intelligible 
 to all her guests," or even " an impromp- 
 tu pun," if plain enough to be promptly 
 understood. 
 
 The importance of talking or of seem- 
 ing to talk extempore is so great that 
 we more than pardon in a talker inaccu- 
 racies of lano-uaore that Avould be inex- 
 cusable in a writer. We expect them, 
 as a matter of course ; we expect such as 
 are common in the class to which he who 
 makes them belongs : for there is no 
 hard and fast line between faults that 
 
212 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 may and faults that may not be commit- 
 ted with impunity. A circle in which 
 it would be an unpardonable sin to say 
 ainH for isnH or areiHt^ might not notice 
 doiHt for doesnH ; and another which 
 frowned upon doiiH for doesnH might not 
 be disturbed by "I don't know «-s" for "I 
 don't know tliat:^^ but almost every circle 
 would look askance at a conversationist 
 who never used wlio for wliom^ never 
 mixed singulars and plurals, never be- 
 gan a sentence in one way and ended it 
 in another, never broke off in the mid- 
 dle of what he was saying, never fell into 
 slanof, never threw the accent on a wron^ 
 syllable or expressed his meaning in- 
 exactly. He who commits no offence 
 against the conventional rules of the 
 language excites a suspicion that he has 
 taken special precautions against a pos- 
 sible violation of them. 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 213 
 
 We all know, of course, that talkers 
 Lave existed — still exist, perhaps — who 
 have acquired the habit of expressing 
 themselves off-hand with as much accu- 
 I'acy as ease; but such cases are rare. 
 The easy talker is usually inexact in his 
 English ; the correct one is stiff, is like 
 Mr. Thomas Day, the author of " Sand- 
 ford and Merton." "Mr. Day," says Miss 
 Edgeworth, " always talked like a book, 
 — and I do believe he always thought 
 in the same full-dress style. This was 
 the result of the systematic care he had 
 early taken to make himself master of 
 his native language, and to cultivate elo- 
 quence." 
 
 Nowadays, as between two expressions 
 of which one is a little more lively but a 
 little less formal than the other, good talk- 
 ers will choose the less formal, though it 
 may be vulgar in the eyes of precisians. 
 
214 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 It is only in schools conducted on the 
 princij)les held by Dickens's Mrs. General 
 that one is expected to say : " come Mth- 
 ^r," instead of "come lieref'' ''''whence did 
 he come?" instead of^^'wliere did he come 
 from?'''' Outside of sucli schools, the 
 language of life, even though it be not 
 high life, is better suited to the purposes 
 of conversation than the lanixuaofe of 
 books. In the days of brocades and the 
 minuet, vulgarity v^^as a bugbear; in the 
 days of tulle and the polka-glide, stifi- 
 ness and formality are in disfavor. 
 
 In conversation, loose sentences are 
 preferable to j^eriods. A periodic sen- 
 tence — that is, a sentence so framed that 
 it keeps a hearer in susj^ense about the 
 meaning until the very end — is prob- 
 ably in the mind of the speaker, as a 
 whole, before it is uttered ; a loose sen- 
 tence — that is, a sentence that says some- 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 215 
 
 thino' in the first clause which is added 
 to, subtracted from, changed iu some 
 way as the sentence goes on — is prob- 
 ably built up word by word as it foils 
 from the lips. The latter has the fur- 
 ther advantage of being readily under- 
 stood. A reader can go over a sentence 
 until he understands its meanino; as a 
 whole ; a listener must catch the mean- 
 ino: at once, if at all. Even in sentences 
 so short that they would be readily un- 
 derstood in either shape, a talker is more 
 likely to use the loose than the peri- 
 odic form. We might naturally write, 
 " Though I went to town early, I had no 
 time for shopping;" but it would be 
 natural to say, " I had no time for shop- 
 ping though I went to town early," or 
 " I w^ent to town early, but I had no 
 time for shopping." 
 
 The best conversation is discursive 
 
216 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 rather than metliodical ; for the logical 
 development of a series of thoughts, or 
 even of a single thought, suggests that 
 the subject-matter, if not the language 
 also, was arranged beforehand. It is, 
 therefore, fatal to that appearance of ex- 
 temporaneousness which is the life of 
 good talk, and which enables a talker to 
 adjust what he says to what is said by 
 the rest of the company. Even when a 
 man attempts to persuade the person 
 with whom he is talkins: to some course 
 of action, he should take care not to be 
 too consecutive, not to press a point too 
 long or too far. The arguments may be 
 as numerous and as strong as one 
 pleases, but they should not be so ar- 
 rano;ed as to lead to the belief that the 
 chain was foro^ed beforehand. Warmth 
 is natural to an earnest talker, but it 
 should come from friction with opposing 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 217 
 
 views. Blows may fall fast, but they 
 should not seem to be dealt with malice 
 aforethou2:ht : the drawiD2:-i'oom should 
 not be turned into an arena. One 
 should carry the day, not by a regular 
 siege, but by short and sharp attacks. 
 Witness the practice of Dr. Johnson and 
 of Carlyle. 
 
 The Enerllsh of conversation should 
 be, not only the product of the moment 
 as regards words, sentences, and general 
 arrangement, but the product — and the 
 best product — of the talker's mind. It 
 should be not only extemporaneous but 
 individual. It should bubble up from 
 its source, like water from a spring. In 
 the effort to secure literary excellence, 
 even a m'eat writer is in damrer of losincf 
 a part of his personality, and none but 
 the greatest succeed in putting the whole 
 of themselves into their written work. 
 
218 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 For a talker to preserve Lis personality 
 should be less difficult, since from bini 
 freshness rather than finish is expected. 
 If he be thoroughly himself, we give him 
 full liberty to phrase his thouglits as he 
 will, sure that what they lose in exact- 
 ness and beauty they will gain in force 
 and raciness. If he says what occurs to 
 him without thinking of his language, 
 his Ian2:ua2:e will be the best he has at 
 hand. If his talk is genuine, it will count 
 for all it is worth. 
 
 Much of what has been said about the 
 English of conversation holds good of 
 the English of addresses that are not 
 read from a manuscript. A public like a 
 private speaker should beware of purism 
 in the choice of words, and of artificial- 
 ity in the construction or the arrange- 
 ment of sentences, or in the manner of 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 219 
 
 utterance. A doubt whether what is 
 apparently extemporaneous has been 
 learned by heart is an obstacle to suc- 
 cess, an obstacle far more serious than 
 i^iults in pronunciation or slips in gram- 
 mar. From these even eminent orators 
 are not altogether exempt. If they were, 
 they might be suspected of having pre- 
 pared in cold blood what they speak 
 with apparent passion — a suspicion tliat 
 becomes a certainty in the case of one 
 who uniformly avoids on the platform 
 mistakes such as he sometimes makes in 
 th e d raw i n o;-r o o m . 
 
 Between the Eno-lish of the drawins:- 
 room and that of the platform, there is, 
 however, one important difference. A 
 speech is, as conversation is not, consec- 
 utive in form, and it should be so in i^ict. 
 Arguments should be presented in an ef- 
 fective order, should support one another. 
 
220 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 should lead to a predetermined couclusiou. 
 The line of thought maybe illuminated by- 
 illustrations and enlivened by anecdote; 
 but in all speeches which aim at anything 
 beyond mere amusement there should be 
 a line of thought. Usually it is wise to 
 commit the order of thought to memory 
 — to make up the train, so to speak, be- 
 fore starting; but the couplings of the 
 train should not be in sight. It is hard 
 to say which is the more w^earisome, a 
 speaker who rambles through the uni- 
 verse, with no destination in view and no 
 apparent reason either for going on or for 
 stopping, or one who moves slowly along 
 a straight and sandy road, counting the 
 milestones as he goes, and pointing from 
 time to time to a distant object at which 
 the tribulations of the tiresome journey 
 are to cease. The best speaker is he who 
 carries his hearers forward so steadily 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 221 
 
 and so agreeably that they are sorry 
 when the journey is over. Such a S23eak- 
 er, Dr. Ezra Ripley, the old Concord min- 
 ister, appears to have been. " He," says 
 Emerson, " had a foresight, when he 
 opened his mouth, of all that he would 
 say, and he marched straight to his con- 
 clusion. In debate, in vestry, or the Ly- 
 ceum, the structure of his sentences was 
 admirable; so neat, so natural, so terse, 
 his words fell like stones ; and often, 
 though quite unconscious of it, his speech 
 was an unconscious satire on the loose, 
 voluminous, draggle-tail periods of other 
 speakers. He sat down when he had 
 done." 
 
 Even a short after-dinner speech should 
 have coherence; and it will be all the 
 better, if — like the five-minute speeches 
 with which Judge Hoar year after year 
 delights the Harvard chapter of the Phi 
 
222 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 Beta Kappa — it contains but one original 
 idea clearly stated, and but one fresh story 
 well told. 
 
 In our day, the best speakers prefer 
 colloquial to declamatory, or oratorical, 
 English — the natural language used in 
 the intercourse of daily life to the artificial 
 language so common a century or even a 
 generation ago. The movement towards 
 this ideal grows every day. In Great 
 Britain, indeed, swelling and swollen pe- 
 riods, such as Chatham thundered forth, 
 are things of the past. In Parliament, 
 at the hustings, at Lord Mayors' and 
 Literary Fund dinners, speakers aim to 
 say what they wish to say, or to hide 
 what they wish not to say, in simple and 
 business-like words. Their graces, if 
 graces they have, are such as would 
 shine in the social world. Their elo. 
 quence, when they are eloquent, comes — 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 223 
 
 as it might come in society — from the 
 subject, or from the excitement of dis- 
 cussion. 
 
 In the United States we are movinor 
 in the same direction. In our political 
 conventions, "highfaluten" speeches are 
 still made, to be sure; but the very 
 newspapers which report them know 
 that they are "highfaluten," are made 
 for "buncombe," or to give a pretext for 
 flag-waving, and for " yells " for a favor- 
 ite candidate. In the country at large, 
 such speeches are endured as a part of 
 " the campaign," conventionally a matter 
 of course, but in no respect useful ex- 
 cept as a means of luring innocent voters 
 who are to be finally caught by more 
 " solid " considerations. Even stump- 
 speeches are now, as a rule, addressed, 
 in appearance at least, to the under- 
 standing, and are couched in simple Ian- 
 
224 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 guage. Wit goes farther than decla- 
 mation; a homely illustration is more 
 telling than a poetical one. The Ameri- 
 can love of bombast has made way for 
 the American love of smartness. Fourth 
 of July fire- crackers have outlived the 
 pyrotechnics of Fourtli of July orations. 
 We still praise ourselves freely, as our 
 ancestors did, but we do so with less 
 " fuss and feathers." 
 
 At the bar, a similar change may be 
 noticed. It is harder than it once w^as to 
 " enthuse" juries — if I may use a word 
 which, like "highfaluten," seems to imply 
 that what was once sublime has become 
 ridiculous. Lawyers talk to twelve men 
 instead of "addressing the panel." Even 
 Rufus Choate, were he to come to life 
 a^rain, would find it difficult to win such 
 cases as he did win, unless he kept his 
 imagination in a leash, shortened and 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 225 
 
 simplified his periods, and made his de- 
 livery conversational. In orations on 
 memorial days or at literary festivals, 
 colloquial English is heard. Even the 
 essays spoken at college commencements 
 are ceasing to be ''mere emptiness."* 
 In the Northern, and especially the 
 North-eastern States, the preference of 
 colloquial to oratorical English is, for 
 obvious reasons, stronger than in the 
 South and the extreme West; but it 
 is showing itself in all parts of the 
 country. It is a preference that should 
 be encouraged by all who prefer the 
 simple to the ornate, the natural to 
 the artificial, the sensible to the so- 
 norous. 
 
 * Words applied by a critic of the day to pas- 
 sages in an oration delivered by Daniel Webster in 
 his Sophomore year (1800) — a judgment with which 
 Mr. Webster concurred. 
 
 15 
 
226 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 Epistolary correspondence might, but 
 for its limits in time and space/"* be 
 defined as conversation with the pen. 
 In a letter, since there is almost always 
 an opportunity to look it over before it 
 is posted, slovenly expressions are less 
 excusable than in what falls from the 
 lips; but even in a letter we are less 
 shocked by slips in English that would 
 disgrace a book than by sentences that 
 bear marks of preparation. 
 
 Whatever faults of expression a letter 
 may have, it is a good letter if it makes 
 the reader feel that the writer is speak- 
 ing with the pen out of the fulness of 
 the heart, not composing something to 
 
 * As to these limits, see Charles Lamb's delight- 
 ful essay entitled " Distant Correspondents." The 
 difficulties Lamb found in communicating with a 
 friend in New South Wales hamper, in some degree, 
 all correspondence by post. 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 227 
 
 be read. When we hear that Lady Dufi 
 Gordon said, " I never could write a 
 good letter; and unless I gallop as hard 
 as I can, and don't stoj) to think, I can 
 say nothing; so all is confused and un- 
 corrected," we feel sure that her letters 
 are asrreeable readins^. When Swift 
 w^rites to Lord Bathurst, " I swear your 
 Lordship is the first person alive that 
 ever made me lean ujDon my elbow when 
 I was writing to him, and by consequence 
 this wdll be the w^orst letter I ever writ," 
 we expect to find Swift in his letters. 
 When, on the other hand, we are told 
 that Lord Orrery, Swift's " noble biog- 
 rapher," made transcripts of his letters, 
 " following regular rules of composi- 
 tion," " adding chapter and verse for 
 model and pointing out the elegance of 
 his own conceits," we are glad that Lord 
 Orrery does not write to us. When we 
 
228 
 
 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 ]'ead that the letters of Mr. Day — the 
 man who talked like his own "Sand- 
 ford and Merton " — were written as fast 
 as his pen could move, and, neverthe- 
 less, are so rhetorical as " to give the 
 idea of their being composed with great 
 care," we are thankful that ^ve are not 
 oblii^ed to read them. 
 
 What gives charm to the letters of 
 Swift, Chesterfield, Cowper, Gray, Lamb, 
 Byron, Dickens, Macaulay, Carlyle, is 
 their air of havins: been written off-hand 
 and of being charged with the writer's 
 personality. When a letter by a less 
 fomous writer deeply interests strangers, 
 it is because the written -page puts them 
 face to face with a human soul which 
 has found free and full expression. In 
 private life, almost every one who has 
 many correspondents counts among them 
 one at least whose letters have a per- 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 229 
 
 sonal cbariu, and are as delightful as bis, 
 or more frequently her, best talk. In 
 Great Britain, indeed, it is in the letters 
 of cultivated women, as De Quincey said, 
 that pure, idiomatic English survives. 
 
 Letters, on the other hand, that were 
 obviously written for publication, or for 
 effect, or as pieces of composition, are in 
 no proper sense letters. Po]3e's famous 
 productions repel a reader who knows 
 that they Avere originally composed, not 
 for the person nominally addressed, but 
 for the public, and were unscrupulously 
 edited before being given to the public. 
 '• Written for everybody,'' as has been 
 said, "they interest nobody." Even Em- 
 erson's letters, good as they are, suffer 
 from his practice of copying them, or at 
 least from our knowledge that he copied 
 them. Whether he expected them to be 
 published after his death, or wished to 
 
230 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 make his sentences more epigrammatic, 
 or to keep his correspondents from know- 
 ing him intimately, — whatever his rea- 
 son for taking such pains, — the eifect is 
 to take from the letters the freshness 
 and genuineness of familiar talk. To 
 get nearer to Emerson, most of us would 
 willingly give up the Emersonian polish 
 which, as we suspect, the letters acquired 
 between the first draft and the tran- 
 script. 
 
 The same absence of method which 
 characterizes the best conversation be- 
 longs to the best letters. Aim at the 
 regular development of a thought, and 
 your letter becomes a treatise. Insist 
 on a topic too long or too earnestly, and 
 your letter becomes a sermon or an ha- 
 rangue. Letters should take much for 
 granted and leave much to the imagina- 
 tion. A letter-writer cannot emphasize 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 231 
 
 or eke out his meaning by a look or a 
 gesture, as a talker can do ; but he may, 
 if he knows his correspondent well, 
 strike familiar notes, and thus, through 
 the association of ideas, say much more 
 than appears to be said. "A letter," as 
 Jeanie Deans says, " canna look, and 
 pray, and beg, and beseech, as the hu- 
 man voice can do to the human heart ;" 
 but it can touch chords in a heart it 
 knows that will vibrate long. 
 
 We have still to consider what place 
 colloquial English should hold in books 
 and other written compositions. 
 
 That the written laneruaoce of almost 
 all children and of the great majority of 
 young people differs widely from their 
 spoken language — and not at all for the 
 better — everybod}^ knows. Everybody 
 knows, too, — everybody, at least, who 
 
232 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 kuows the history of the language, — that 
 a difference almost as great, but dissimi- 
 lar in ori2:in and in characteristics, once 
 existed between the English generally 
 talked and that written by the few to 
 be read by the few. 
 
 Not that the distance between the lit- 
 erary and the living language was ever 
 so 2:reat in Ensilish as in some other 
 tongues; but even down to the end of 
 the seventeenth century there was a 
 marked distinction between the two. 
 The living language was used in plays 
 that were to be performed before a 
 mixed audience, in poems that were read 
 aloud, in translations of the Bible, and 
 in a few books, like "The Pilgrim's 
 Progress," written by uneducated men 
 and aimed at the popular conscience; 
 but the great majority of authors, ex- 
 pecting to be read by scholars only, 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 233 
 
 used scholastic ratlier than popular words 
 and constructions. Dryden was, perhaps, 
 the first prose author of eminence who 
 recognized the importance of a mastery 
 of living as well as of literary English ; 
 and ev^en he had not learned the lesson 
 thoroughly. He had "scattered criticism 
 over his preftices," says Dr. Johnson, 
 "with very little parsimony; but though 
 he sometimes condescended to be some- 
 what familiar, his manner was in general 
 too scholastic for those who had yet 
 their rudiments to learn, and found it 
 not easy to understand their master. 
 His observations were framed rather for 
 those that were learning to write than 
 for those that read only to talk." 
 
 When, however, the reading public 
 came to include many persons of both 
 sexes who were far from being scholars, 
 w^riters naturally adapted themselves to 
 
234: OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 the tastes of the majority. It was Ad- 
 dison's boast til at lie bad brought phi- 
 losophy down from the clouds and out 
 of the closet, and had served it with the 
 tea and toast of society. It was Swift's 
 purpose — achieved with wonderful suc- 
 cess — so to write as to be readily un- 
 derstood by any one who could spell 
 out the words or could follow a reader 
 who had spelled them out in advance. 
 Defoe did, perhaps, even more than 
 Swift or Addison to diminish the differ- 
 ences between spoken and written Eng- 
 lish. His writino-s are full of words 
 taken from the ftimiliar speech of plain 
 people, and of slips of expression usual 
 in his time with rapid talkers who had 
 more mother- w^it than culture. Other 
 writers of Queen Anne's time followed 
 in the steps of the masters, and soon the 
 written language took the form which it 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 235 
 
 Las kept, in the main, till the present 
 time. Modern English dates from the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century. 
 
 In one eminent contemporary of Swift, 
 the transition from ancient to modern 
 methods of writinc: was towards an or- 
 atorical rather than a colloquial style. 
 Shut out from Parliament by mistimed 
 politics, Bolingbroke wrote pamphlets 
 that sound like speeches, and that reach- 
 ed a much larger public than they would 
 have reached as speeches. Aiming to 
 compose periods that should sound well, 
 he eked out his matter with words, his 
 eloquence with declamation. The influ- 
 ence of his swelling sentences, like that 
 of Pope's rhetorical couplets, was felt 
 through the eighteenth century and far 
 into the nineteenth, was felt by Macau- 
 lay and Motley, as well as by Gibbon, 
 Johnson, and Burke. These authors. 
 
236 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 ^vith all tlieir merits, suffer more or less, 
 like other writers of their times, from a 
 tendency to be sonorous rather than sim- 
 ple, to exj^ress themselves like a man 
 with a speaking-trumpet at his lips. 
 Until a comparatively recent date, or- 
 atorical language w^as still dominant in 
 newspapers and reviews, as well as on 
 the platform and in the pulpit. Even 
 now there are authors, as well as public 
 speakers, who have, like Daudet's acade- 
 mician, the '^ parole h son d'ophicleide 
 faite pour les hauteurs de la chaire." 
 
 Happily, however, for the English- 
 speaking world, the influence of "The 
 Spectator," of '' Gulliver's Travels," and 
 of "Eobinson Crusoe," has been strong- 
 ly felt by succeeding writers. Goldsmith 
 and Sterne, Cobbett and Franklin, car- 
 ried on the good work begun by the 
 WTiters of the age of Queen Anne; and 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 237 
 
 the stream of tendency, in written as in 
 spoken work, now sets towards collo- 
 quial, rather than literary or oratorical, 
 English. De Quincey's rhetorical flights 
 — admirable in their way as they are — 
 find more critics than readers nowa- 
 days. Even Mr. Euskin is ashamed — 
 unduly so, perhaps — of the paragraphs in 
 "Modern Painters" which were praised 
 on all hands at their first appearance, 
 and he now writes in a simpler style. 
 Other authors have taken pains, while 
 revising their works, to substitute short, 
 plain words for long and unfamiliar 
 ones. 
 
 The reading public has, indeed, so 
 little taste for tlie pompous or the pe- 
 dantic that writers who have a weak- 
 ness for either try to make amends by 
 dropping into slang now and then ; but 
 the disposition to copy in books the 
 
238 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 faults of conversation is an unfortunate 
 one. In work carefully prepared for the 
 press vulgarisms which are common in 
 conversation and may be pardoned in 
 hastily written private letters have no 
 excuse. A style can be rapid without 
 being slovenly, plain without being low, 
 and racy without being provincial. 
 
 It is clear, too, that lack of method, 
 which is, as we have seen, a merit in 
 conversation and in private lettei's, can- 
 not but be a defect in all writino:s which 
 are not intended to reproduce conversa- 
 tion or letters. Those anions: Addison's 
 Spectators which are least methodical in 
 appearance were evidently written with 
 a definite purpose and on a plan of their 
 own ; and they have, therefore, with all 
 their variety, unity of composition : but 
 many of Steele's papers ramble from topic 
 to toj)ic like ordinary conversation ; they 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 239 
 
 are collections of paragraphs ratlier tlian 
 essays. Sterne, who to many readers 
 seems to have no method in his mad gam- 
 bols, assures ns that he constantly has 
 the end of his journey in view, and moves 
 towards it all the time, though by a cir- 
 cuitous route. De Quincey, on the other 
 hand, formally announces a subject, and 
 then proceeds to deal with every subject 
 under the sky except or in addition to 
 the one promised, — a fault which renders 
 not a few of his essays, in spite of their 
 brilliancy, irritating as well as unsatis- 
 factory to a reader who is not content 
 with a discourse on " matters and thino-s 
 in general." Emerson's want of conti- 
 nuity does not irritate, — that he could 
 not do, — but it saddens and perplexes 
 those who wish to get somew^here, or 
 who feel that there is a limit to their 
 power of assimilating detached Orphic 
 
240 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 sayings, however profound in substance 
 and strikino; in form. 
 
 Are there any other particulars in 
 which w^ritten should differ from spoken 
 En^-lish ? Should the production of 
 rhetorical paragraphs, such as De Quin- 
 cey plumed himself uj^on, or of '' purple 
 patches," such as Macaulay proudly put 
 into his w^ork, be encouraged? Is the 
 style of Gibbon or that of Hume to be 
 preferred? the style of Johnson's ^'Eam- 
 bler " or that of Goldsmith's " Citizen of 
 the World?" Ruskin's later style or his 
 earlier one ? 
 
 George Sand somewhere says that it 
 is as difficult to write in the fiuuiliar 
 style in which one talks as it is to write 
 in an ornate and literary style, and that 
 each style has its place. Which, how- 
 evei', should we aim at by preference? 
 Should we strive to write "like a human 
 
i 
 
 COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 2J:1 
 
 being," as Bageliot advises, or should 
 we array our ideas in full dress, as some 
 authors, it is said, do their persons be- 
 fore taking up the pen ? 
 
 This question has been well answered 
 by an Irish novelist and by a great 
 French critic. "The writing," says Miss 
 Edgeworth, " which has least the ajD- 
 pearance of literary manufiicture almost 
 always pleases me the best." " S'accou- 
 tumer," writes St. Beuve, "^l ecrire comme 
 on parle et comme on pense, n'est-ce 
 pas dej^ se mettre en demeure de bien 
 penser?" In another essay, St. Beuve, 
 after saying that in the writings of Fen- 
 elon and Voltaire " all true French rhet- 
 oric, natural rhetoric," is to be found, 
 cites with approval a passage from each. 
 " Un auteur qui a trop d'esprit, et qui 
 en veut toujours avoir, disait Fenelon, 
 basse et epuise le mien : je n'en veux 
 16 
 
242 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 point avoir tant. S'il en montrait moins, 
 il me laisserait respirer et me ferait plus 
 de j)laisir: il me tient trop tendu; la lec- 
 ture de ses vers me devient line etude. 
 Tant d'eclairs m'eblouissent ; je cherche 
 une lumiere douce qui sonlage mes 
 faibles yeux. Je demande un poete 
 aimable, proportionne an commun des 
 hommes, qui fasse tout pour eux, et rien 
 pour lui. Je veux un sublime si fami- 
 lier, si doux et si simple, que chacun soit 
 d'abord tente de croire qu'il I'aurait 
 trouve sans peine, quoique peu d'hommes 
 soient capable de le trouver. Je j^refere 
 Taimable au surprenant et au merveil- 
 leux." The passage quoted from Vol- 
 taire chimes in with that from Fenelon : 
 " Le grand art, ce me semble, est de 
 passer du familier k Theroique, et de 
 descendre avec des nuances delicates. 
 Malheur h tout ouvrage de ce genre qui 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 243 
 
 sera toiijours serieux, toujours grand ! il 
 ennuiera: ce ne sera qii'une declamation. 
 II font des peintures naives; il faut de 
 la variete; il faut du simple, de Televe, 
 de I'agreable. Je ne dis pas que j'aie 
 tout cela, mais je voudrais bien Tavoir; 
 et celui qui y parviendra sera mon ami 
 et mon maitre," 
 
 What Fenelon and Voltaire say of 
 verse is at least equally true of prose. 
 The groundwork should be the familiar, 
 the simple, the agreeablei. If the sul> 
 lime, the elevated, the eloquent comes 
 into a piece of prose, it should come in a 
 shape so natural as tq, lead the reader to 
 imao'ine that he miojht have found it 
 
 O <-J 
 
 himself, should come and should go by 
 easy and gradual steps, as it does with 
 Cardinal Newman and with Thackeray 
 at their best. 
 
 The language of books should, then, 
 
24:4 OUR ENGLISH. 
 
 be, in the main, the language of conver- 
 sation; but it should not be that of poor 
 conversation. From this side too, Vol- 
 taire utters a wise word of w^arning. 
 Speaking of Bayle, whose style he terms 
 a journalist's style, he says : " Dans son 
 style toujours clair et naturel, il y a tro23 
 de negligence, trop d'oubli de biense- 
 ances, trop d'incorrection. II est diffus : 
 il fait, k la verite, conversation avec son 
 lecteur comme Montaigne; et en cela il 
 charme tout le monde; mais il s'aban- 
 donne a une mollesse de style, et aux 
 expressions triviales d'une conversation 
 trop simple ; et en cela il rebute souvent 
 rhomme de gout." 
 
 An author w^ho tr.ies to w^'ite as he 
 talks should, in fine, be careful to avoid 
 the faults and defects of conversation, 
 while retaining: its excellences. In the 
 effort to be natural, he should not sufi'er 
 
COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH. 245 
 
 himself to be incorrect or vulgar; in 
 his disdain of the arts of rhetoric, he 
 should not be betrayed into slipshod 
 English : but his purpose should be to 
 write as he talks in his best moments — 
 a purpose not easy to carry out, as ev- 
 ery one who has tried is painfully aware, 
 but worth all the trouble it costs. To 
 write as we talk iu our best moments is 
 to write simply, naturally, sincerely; to 
 subordinate manner to matter, sound to 
 sense; to abjure exaggeration in every 
 form, intellectual or emotional. Thus, 
 and thus only, will what we write be 
 the exact and complete reproduction of 
 what we think and feel in our sanest 
 and most fruitful moods. 
 
 THE END. 
 
THE PUINCiriES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 The Principles of Rhetoric and their Application. 
 By Adams S. Hill, Boylston Professor of Rhet- 
 oric and Oratory in Harvard College, pp. vi., 
 808. With an Appendix comprising General 
 Rules for Punctuation. 12mo, Half Leather, 
 SO cents. 
 
 We commend the book to all educators of youth, and we 
 particularly advise those who are seeking to educate them- 
 selves in English composition to make a thorough study of 
 its pages. — Christian at Work, N. Y. 
 
 The arrangement of the work is excellent, its style is clear, 
 and it is in all respects a desirable and a useful manual for 
 students. — Saturday Evening Gazette, Boston. 
 
 It is succinct, clear, and pithy, and covers the subject 
 adequately. ... It is evidently the result of practical experi- 
 ence in the elass-room. — N. Y. World. 
 
 The work is in every respect an excellent one. — Commercial 
 Bulletin, Boston. 
 
 Professor Hill's style is plain and direct, and his book de- 
 serves an immediate and permanent place in the schools of 
 the country. — Boston Transcript. 
 
 His style is direct, lucid, and forcible to an unusual degree, 
 and he is exceedingly happy in the quotations with which he 
 illustrates and drives home his meaning. . . ."We can recall no 
 other volume in which the proper use of language is at once 
 so succinctly and clearly set forth. — rhiladclphia Inquirer. 
 
 Published et HARPER & BROTHERS, Kew York. 
 
 r^" IlAnPKR & Brothers will send the above ivork by mail, postage 
 prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt 
 of the price. 
 
STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Studies in English Literatnre : being Typical Selec- 
 tions of Bi-itisli and American Antliorsliip, from 
 Shakespeare to the Present Time ; together with 
 Definitions, Notes, Analyses, and Glossary, as an 
 aid to Systematic Literary Study. For Use in 
 High and Normal Schools, Academies, Semina- 
 ries, &c. By Prof. AVilliam Swinton, Author 
 of " Harper's Language Series," and Gold Medal- 
 ist Paris Exposition, 1878. pp. xxxiv., 638. 
 With Portraits. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $1 20. 
 
 There is excellent work throughout the book, which is one 
 that deserves to be introduced into higher schools where 
 English literature is properly taught, — Philadelphia Evening 
 Bulletin. 
 
 Collections of typical passages from the writings of the 
 masters in English literature are many, but we have seen 
 none which seemed to us to be so judiciously made or so 
 well adapted to the use of high schools as the work prepared 
 by Mr. William Swinton. . . . The selections are well chosen^ 
 the notes are judicious and helpful, and in general the work 
 is admirably fit for its purpose. — JSf. Y. Evening Post. 
 
 Will be an invaluable aid to teachers of rhetoric and Eng- 
 lish literature, as it gives extracts from representative au- 
 thors of different epochs, with an excellent characterization of 
 each by a distinguished critic, notes, literary analyses, and a 
 glossary. — Cincinnati Commercial. 
 
 Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 
 
 Harper & Brothers loill send the above u^ork by mail, x>ostage 
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